THE TRIALS OF MR KEYSER, GRANGER.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 368, 30 January 1880, Page 3

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 fo spend a day with a friend, instructed the girl to whitewash the kitchen during her absence. Upon returning, *!.'/s Keyser found the job completed in a very satisfactory manner. On "Wednesday Mrs Keyser always churns, and on the following Wednesday when she wns 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 eight o'clock in the morning, and she turned until ten without signs of buffer 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 bold of the crank and turned it energetically until two o'clock, when she let go with a remark which conveyed the expression that she believed the churn to be haunted ; then Mr Keyser came out and wanted to know what was the matter with that churn ; it was a good enough churn if people only know how to use it. Mr Keyset' then worked the crank until half-past throe, when, as the butter had not yet come, he surrendered it again, to the hired man bocause 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 end of the earth ; and when the perspiration began to stream from him, and still the butter didn't come, he uttered one yell of rage and disappointment, and kicked the churn over the fence ; when Mrs Keyser went to pick it up, she put her nose close down to to the buttermilk and took a sniff; then she understood how it was ; the girl had mixed the witewash 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.