During the great winter revivals in Elder Leland’s church, Singer Brown was all eyes, ears, and voice. But the dairy-making season that produced the sweet butter and mammoth cheeses for which Cheshire became famous was very trying to his eyelids, during the long Sunday sermons, and the tithing-man often had a sore trial to keep his attention steady after the “sixthly” or “seventhly.” It was all so restful in the old church,—the bobolinks singing in the clover outside, the red-breasted robins in the tall trees! The cool breezes came into the windows from the hayfields, over which the cloud-shadows passed. Then, too, even fiery Elder Leland’s voice had a far-away sound when he came to the usual part of a New England sermon about the Jews in Jerusalem, and still more dreary was it when the Jews were in Babylon. Singer Brown, on such occasions, would become oblivious of both the Jews and the Gentiles, and would have to be waked by the vigilant tithing-man. Elder Leland himself had a genius for waking people on such restful and balmy days. Once, when a farmer under the gallery had fallen asleep and tipped back his head, with his mouth stretched open from ear to ear, some very imaginative boys in the gallery stuck a pin into a bean and lowered it down by a string to the open mouth, like a bucket into a well. When the tall Elder saw it he didn’t rebuke the boys, but seizing the Bible, slammed it down on the pulpit with a cannon shake, at the same time calling out to the poor man: “Wake up! wake up!” The industrious farmer’s slumbers were broken by these gentle circumstances, and he was enabled to follow the wanderings of the Jews during the rest of the sermon. But Singer Brown, on one Sunday, fell asleep beside the old bass-viol amid such scandalous consequences that the tithing-man, the clerk, and the venerable deacons never forgave him. It all is supposed to have happened in the summer of 1803, the third year of the reign of the universal Kings under the good King Commoner, Thomas Jefferson, when ambitious people of Cheshire had put their heads together to make a bigger cheese than the one that had been made for their chosen President. The history of this cheese is often confused with the Jeffersonian present. [Illustration: UNITED STATES BATTLE-SHIP “ILLINOIS.”] One Sunday morning in June, Goody Brown gave to her consort, Singer Billy, the long-necked pitcher, and sent him to the neighbors for milk. Billy went from house to house, but was refused. “Not to-day, Billy,” said every one; “we are saving our milk for the big cheese, you know.” After Billy had wandered about amid the dews to the Masons’, the Waggoners’, and others, without success, although all the pantries were overflowing, he obtained a pint of milk at last from a Federalist, who was not in full sympathy even with the enterprises of the community.