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,