_THE TRIALS OF MR. KEYSER, GRANGER_.
Mr. Keyser mentioned recently that he had employed a new hired girl,
and that soon after her arrival Mrs. Keyser, before starting to spend
the day with a friend, instructed the girl to whitewash the kitchen
during her absence. Upon returning, Mrs. Keyser found the job
completed in a very satisfactory manner. On Wednesday, Mrs. Keyser
always churns, and on the following Wednesday, when she was ready, she
went out; and finding that Mr. Keyser had already put the milk into
the churn, she began to turn, the handle. This was at eight o'clock
in the morning, and she turned until ten without any signs of butter
appearing. Then she called in the hired man, and he turned until
dinner-time, when he knocked off with some very offensive language,
addressed to the butter, which had not yet come. After dinner the
hired girl took hold of the crank and turned it energetically until
two o'clock, when she let go with a remark which conveyed the
impression that she believed the churn to be haunted. Then Mr. Keyser
came out and said he wanted to know what was the matter with that
churn. It was a good enough churn if people only knew enough to use
it. Mr. Keyser then worked the crank until half-past three, when, as
the butter had not come, he surrendered it again to the hired man
because he had an engagement in the village. The man ground the
machine to an accompaniment of frightful imprecations. Then the Keyser
children each took a turn for half an hour, then Mrs. Keyser tried her
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
deciding upon a tombstone. The man at the marble-yard, however, at
last sold him a beautiful one with an angel weeping over a kind of a
flower-pot, with the legend, "Not lost, but gone before."
Then he got the village newspaper to put a good obituary notice of him
in type, and he told his wife that he would be gratified if she would
come out in the spring and plant violets upon his grave. He said it
was hard to leave her and the children, but she must try and bear up
under it. These afflictions are for our good, and when he was an angel
he would come and watch over her and keep his eye on her. He said she
might marry again if she wanted to; for although the mere thought of
it nearly broke his heart, he wished her, above all, to be happy, and
to have some one to love her and protect her from the storms of the
rude world. Then he and Mrs. Keyser and the children cried, and
Keyser, as a closing word of counsel, advised her not to plough for
corn earlier than the middle of March.
On the night of the 13th of September there was a flood in the creek,
and Keyser got up at four o'clock in the morning of the 14th and
worked until night, trying to save his buildings and his woodpile. He
was so busy that he forgot all about its being the day of his death;
and as he was very tired, he went to bed early and slept soundly all
night.
About six o'clock on the morning of the 15th there was a ring at the
door-bell. Keyser jumped out of bed, threw up the front window and
exclaimed,
"Who's there?"
"It's me--Toombs," said the undertaker.
"What do you want at this time of the morning?" demanded Keyser.
"Want?" said Toombs, not recognizing Keyser. "Why, I've brought around
the ice to pack Keyser in, so's he'll keep until the funeral. The
corpse'd spoil this kind of weather if we didn't."
Then Keyser remembered, and it made him feel angry when he thought how
the day had passed and left him still alive, and how he had made a
fool of himself. So he said,
"Well, you can just skeet around home agin with that ice; the corpse
is not yet dead. You're a little too anxious, it strikes me. You're
not goin' to inter me yet, if you have got everything ready. So you
can haul off and unload."
About half-past ten that morning the deacons came around, with crape
on their hats and gloom in their faces, to carry the body to the
grave; and while they were on the front steps the marble-yard man
drove up with the flower-pot tombstone and a shovel, and stepped in to
ask the widow how deep she wanted the grave dug. Just then the choir
arrived with the minister, and the company was assembled in the
parlor, when Keyser came in from the stable, where he had been dosing
a horse with patent medicine and warm "mash" for the glanders. He was
surprised, but he proceeded to explain that there had been a little
mistake, somehow. He was also pained to find that everybody seemed to
be a good deal disappointed, particularly the tombstone-man, who went
away mad, declaring that such an old fraud ought to be buried, anyhow,
dead or alive. Just as the deacons left in a huff the tailor's boy
arrived with the burial-suit, and before Keyser could kick him off the
steps the paper-carrier flung into the door the _Patriot_, in which
that obituary notice occupied a prominent place.
Anybody who wants a good reliable tombstone that has a flower-pot and
an angel on it, with an affecting inscription, can buy one of that
kind, at a sacrifice for cash, from Keyser. He thinks the bad dream
must have been caused by eating too much at supper.
After he felt assured that he should have to remain a little longer
in this troublous world, Mr. Keyser determined to effect some
improvements of his farm that he had thought of. He greatly needed a
constant supply of water, and he resolved to bore an artesian well in
the barn-yard. The boring was done with a two-inch auger fixed in the
end of an iron rod, which was twisted around by a wheel worked by two
men. One day, after they had gone down a good many feet, they tried to
pull the rod out, but it would not come. They were afraid to use much
force lest the auger should come off and stay in the hole, and so, as
the boring went along well enough, they concluded to keep on turning,
and to trust to the force of the water, when they struck it, to drive
the loose dirt up from the hole. When they had gone down about three
hundred and fifty feet, they began to think it queer that there were
no signs of water, but they bored a hundred feet farther; and one
day, just as they were beginning on another hundred, something odd
happened.
On the day in question Keyser's boy came running into the house and
told him to come into the garden quick, for there was some kind of an
extraordinary animal with a sharp nose burrowing out of the ground.
Keyser concluded that it must be either a potato-bug or a grasshopper
that had been hatched in the spring, and he took out a bottle of
poison to drop on it when it came up. When Keyser reached the spot, a
couple of hundred yards from where they were boring the well, there
certainly was some kind of a creature slowly pushing its way up
through the sod. Its nose seemed to resemble a sharp point like steel.
Keyser dropped some poison on it; but it didn't appear to mind the
stuff, but kept slowly creeping up from the ground. Then Keyser felt
it, and was astonished to find that it felt exactly like the end of a
fork-prong. He sent the boy over to call Perkins and the rest of the
neighbors. Pretty soon a large crowd collected, and by this time the
animal had emerged to the extent of a couple of inches.
[Illustration: A QUEER PLANT]
Everybody was amazed to see that it looked exactly like the end of a
large auger; and two or three timid men were so scared at the idea of
such a thing actually growing out of the earth that they suddenly
got over the fence and left. Perkins couldn't account for it; but he
suggested that maybe somebody might have planted a gimlet there, and
it had taken root and blossomed out into an auger; but he admitted
that he had never heard of such a thing before.
The excitement increased so that the men who were boring the artesian
well knocked off and came over to see the phenomenon. It was noticed
that as soon as they stopped work the auger ceased to grow; and when
they arrived, they looked at it for a minute, and one of them said,
"Bill, do you recognize that auger?"
"I think I do," said Bill.
"Well, Bill, you go and unhitch that wheel from the other end of the
rod."
Bill did so; and then the other man asked the crowd to take hold of
the auger and pull. They did; and out came four hundred and fifty feet
of iron rod. The auger had slid off to the side, turned upward and
come to the surface in Keyser's garden. Then the artesian well was
abandoned, and Keyser bought a steam-pump and began to get water from
the river.
Another remarkable boring experience that occurred in our neighborhood
deserves to be related here. When Butterwick bought his present place,
the former owner offered, as one of the inducements to purchase, the
fact that there was a superb sugar-maple tree in the garden. It was a
noble tree, and Butterwick made up his mind that he would tap it some
day and manufacture some sugar. However, he never did so until last
year. Then he concluded to draw the sap and to have "a sugar-boiling."
Mr. Butterwick's wife's uncle was staying with him, and after inviting
some friends to come and eat the sugar they got to work. They took a
huge wash-kettle down into the yard and piled some wood beneath it,
and then they brought out a couple of buckets to catch the sap, and
the auger with which to bore a hole in the tree.
Butterwick's wife's uncle said that the bucket ought to be set about
three feet from the tree, as the sap would spurt right out with a good
deal of force, and it would be a pity to waste any of it.
Then he lighted the fire, while Butterwick bored the hole about four
inches deep. When he took the auger out, the sap did not follow, but
Butterwick's wife's uncle said what it wanted was a little time, and
so, while the folks waited, he put a fresh armful of wood on the fire.
They waited half an hour; and as the sap didn't come, Butterwick
concluded that the hole was not deep enough, so he began boring again,
but he bored too far, for the auger went clear through the tree and
penetrated the back of his wife's uncle, who was leaning up against
the trunk trying to light his pipe. He jumped nearly forty feet, and
they had to mend him up with court-plaster.
[Illustration: TOO MUCH OF A BORE.]
Then he said he thought the reason the sap didn't come was that there
ought to be a kind of spigot in the hole, so as to let it run off
easily. They got the wooden spigot from the vinegar-barrel in the
cellar and inserted it. Then, as the sap did not come, Butterwick's
wife's uncle said he thought the spigot must be jammed in so tight
that it choked the flow; and while Butterwick tried to push it out,
his wife's uncle fed the fire with some kindling-wood. As the spigot
could not be budged with a hammer, Butterwick concluded to bore it out
with the auger; and meanwhile his wife's uncle stirred the fire. Then,
the auger broke off short in the hole, and Butterwick had to go half a
mile to the hardware-store to get another one.
Then Butterwick bored a fresh hole; and although the sap would not
come, the company did; and they examined with much interest the
kettle, which was now red-hot, and which Butterwick's wife's uncle
was trying to lift off the fire with the hay-fork. As the sap still
refused to come, Butterwick went over for Keyser to ask him how to
make the exasperating tree disgorge. When he arrived, he looked at the
hole, then at the spigot, then at the kettle and then at the tree.
Then, turning to Butterwick with a mournful face, he said,
"Butterwick, you have had a good deal of trouble in your life, an'
it's done you good; it's made a man of you. This world is full of
sorrow, but we must bear it without grumbling. You know that, of
course. Consequently, now that I've some bad news to break to you, I
feel 'sif the shock won't knock you endways, but'll be received with
patient resignation. I say I hope you won't break down an' give away
to your feelin's when I tell you that there tree is no sugar-maple
at all. Grashus! why, that's a black hickory. It is, indeed; and you
might as well bore for maple-sugar in the side of a telegraph-pole."
Then the company went home, and Butterwick's wife's uncle said he had
an engagement with a man in Hatboro' which he must keep right off.
Butterwick took the kettle up to the house; but as it was burned out,
he sold it next day for fifteen cents for old iron and bought a new
one for twelve dollars. He thinks now maybe it's better to buy your
maple sugar.