The story of the great Cheshire Cheese was once a New England wonder-tale, but was seldom correctly told, in all of its essential details. The making of it furnishes a picture of the early humor of the village, than which few pastoral scenes can be more pleasing, or more widely in contrast with many of the grim Puritan legends. Cheshire has a cheese-factory now; then every farm had a cheese-press. There was joy among the industrious dames of Cheshire, when the old stage-driver of the Berkshire Hills blew his horn, and swung his hat, and shouted, “Hurrah for President Jefferson!” The buxom dairy-women had been well-schooled in Democratic politics by Elder Leland, himself an intimate friend of Jefferson, and a disciple of the broad principles of the Declaration. “Toot, toot for Jefferson!” rung out the horn and voice of Cameralsman, the lusty stage-driver, as he passed through the thrifty Mason farms. “Jefferson it is!” said Freelove Mason, the ruddiest dame of the Berkshire Hills; “and how shall we celebrate our victory like free and honest people that we are?” “How?” said the Cheshire dames. “We will make the biggest cheese ever pressed in America,—such an one as the farmers have been joking about,—and send it to the new President for a present. Every cow in Berkshire shall furnish the milk for the curd.” I need not say that the great cheese was made. All the Yankee world knows that. The summer of bobolinks and morning-glories that followed the political spring of happiness in Cheshire saw a great gathering of curds on a certain day, and all the kirtled dames met at Elisha Brown’s, and compounded the mammoth gift to the President. It was pressed in a cider-mill, and if it did not require four horses to draw it, it is said that that number was harnessed to the vehicle that brought it from the press, where it had been pressed for ten days. It weighed one thousand two hundred and thirty-five pounds, was carried to the Hudson and shipped to Washington. Elder Leland went with the great cheese, “preaching,” as he said, “all the way.” The stately correspondence between Leland and Jefferson, in offering and accepting the gift, is still preserved. Those were the days when every voter supposed himself to be a born king by right of the Constitution, and it took the old formal style of writing to express the sentiments of the new monarchs. Jefferson’s letter, accepting the great cheese, was worthy of the author of “When in the course of human events.”