Elbow-Room Part 31

His friends explained his situation to him, and then he asked,

"What drowned me?"

They told him sadly that he was injured during an attempt to revolutionize navigation and to prepare the way for a walk to India.

"How did I try to do it?" he inquired.

They wept as they reminded him that he had started to skim over the river like a swallow, with a scow upon each foot, and then he faintly said,

"Where in thunder are those machines?"

His friends produced, the new motor with which Bradley intended to break up the steams.h.i.+p lines; and when he had looked at them for a moment, he fell back and whispered,

"It's no use. I can't do 'em justice. Eight men couldn't cuss 'em to satisfy me. But split 'em up! Have 'em mashed into kin'lin-wood before I get well, or the sight of 'em'll set me crazy."

Then he was carried home, and after being in bed about a fortnight he came out with a pallid cheek, a sorrowful heart and ideas for six or seven new machines.

CHAPTER XXIX.

_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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter come from the ends of the earth; and when the perspiration began to stream from him, and still the b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.termilk 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 a.s.sured 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 cus.h.i.+ons inside, and he instructed the undertaker to use his best hea.r.s.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.r.a.pe 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sured 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 gra.s.shopper 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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-p.r.o.ng. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 b.u.t.terwick 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 n.o.ble tree, and b.u.t.terwick 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. b.u.t.terwick'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.

b.u.t.terwick'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 b.u.t.terwick bored the hole about four inches deep. When he took the auger out, the sap did not follow, but b.u.t.terwick'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, b.u.t.terwick 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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, b.u.t.terwick's wife's uncle said he thought the spigot must be jammed in so tight that it choked the flow; and while b.u.t.terwick 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, b.u.t.terwick 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 b.u.t.terwick had to go half a mile to the hardware-store to get another one.

Then b.u.t.terwick 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 b.u.t.terwick's wife's uncle was trying to lift off the fire with the hay-fork. As the sap still refused to come, b.u.t.terwick 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 b.u.t.terwick with a mournful face, he said,

"b.u.t.terwick, 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 b.u.t.terwick's wife's uncle said he had an engagement with a man in Hatboro' which he must keep right off.

b.u.t.terwick 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.