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