Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1875 — A Monrnful Dream. [ARTICLE]

A Monrnful Dream.

Last December my friend Keyser dreamed one night that he would die on the 13th of January. So strongly was he assured of the fact that the vision would prove true that he began at once to make j>reparations 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 Methodist Church, and selected six of the deacons as his pall-bearers; he also requested the choir to sing at tha funeral, and he got them to run over a favorite hymn of his, to see how it would sound. Then he got Toonfbs, the undertaker, to knock together a burial-casket with silverplated handles, and cushions inside, and he instructed the undertaker to rush out 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 mar-ble-yard wanted to shove off on him a sec-ond-hand one, with a stubby-nose angel weeping over a kind of a flower-pot; but Keyser finally ordered a new one, with a design representing a rosebud with a broken stem, and the legend, “Not lost, but gone before.” Then he got the village newspaper to put a good obituary notice ofhim 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 to 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 bis eye on her. He said she might marry again if she wanted to, for, although the mere thought of it nearly broke his hqprt, 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 plow for corn earlier than the middle of March.

On the night of the 12th of January there was a flood in the creek, and Keyser got up at four o’clock in the morning of the 13t.h and worked until night trying to save his buildings and his wood-pile. 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 14th 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 in the mischief 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 kinder weather if we didn’t.” Then Keyser remembered; and it actually made Lim feel mad when he thought how the day had passed and left him still alive, and how he had made a fool of himself. So the corpse said: “ Well, you can just skeet around home agin with that ice; the corpse is not yet dead. You’re just a leetle too anxious, it strikes me. You’re not goin’ to chuck me into a sepulcher yet, if you have got everything ready. 'So you can haul off and unload.” About halfrpast ten that morning the deacons cafcne around with crape on their hats and gloom in tlieir faces, to carry the body to the grave, and while they were on the front steps the marble-yard man drove up with the rosebud 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 firoceeded to explain that there had been a ittle 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 rammed into the ground anyhow, dead or alive. Juat 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 into the door the Morning Armu, in which that obituary notice occupied a prominent place. Anybody who wants" a good, reliable tombstone that has a broken rosebud on it, and that has never been used, can buy one of that kind, at a sacrifice for cash, from Keyser. He has not yet begun to watch over his wife in the character of an asgel, but several times since he has thrown flat-irons and scuttles at her when she scolded him for chewing tobacco in the house. He has made up his mind now to die without getting ready when his

time comes, and he has informed one of those deacons confidentially that he thinks that bad dream must have been caused by eating too much sausage at supper. —Max Adder, in N. T. Weekly.