hand; and when she was exhausted, she again enlisted the hired girl,
who said her prayers while she turned. But the butter didn't come.

When Keyser came home and found the churn still in action, he felt
angry; and seizing the handle, he said he'd make the butter come if he
stirred up an earthquake in doing it. Mr. Keyser effected about two
hundred revolutions of the crank a minute--enough to have made
any ordinary butter come from the ends of the earth; and when the
perspiration began to stream from him, and still the butter didn't
come, he uttered one wild yell of rage and disappointment and kicked
the churn over the fence. When Mrs. Keyser went to pick it up, she
put her nose down close to the buttermilk and took a sniff. Then she
understood how it was. The girl had mixed the whitewash in the churn
and left it there. A good, honest and intelligent servant who knows
how to churn could have found a situation at Keyser's the next day.
There was a vacancy.

Mr. Keyser during the summer made a very narrow escape from a
melancholy ending. He dreamed one night that he would die on the 14th
of September. So strongly was he assured of the fact that the vision
would prove true that he began at once to make preparations for his
departure. He got measured for a burial-suit, he drew up his will, he
picked out a nice lot in the cemetery and had it fenced in, he joined
the church and selected six of the deacons as his pall-bearers; he
also requested the choir to sing at the funeral, and he got them to
run over a favorite hymn of his to see how it would sound. Then he
got Toombs, the undertaker, to knock together a burial-casket with
silver-plated handles, and cushions inside, and he instructed the
undertaker to use his best hearse, and to buy sixty pairs of black
gloves, to be distributed among the mourners. He had some trouble