“The light in the window of the Phantom inn had allured me to the edge of a broad, false precipice, and I was just about to fall over into the pond when my old coach dog’s warning word had saved me. The dog had evidently dragged his dark-minded master over the rocky cliff into the pond.
“Searle had carried the window and light in his hand, and with covered feet had moved back to allure travellers.
“‘Silas?’ Yes, I must answer that question. What became of him? I took him back to Albany with me. He was an old dog then, and used to repeat that word in his distress. He said it more than once on the day that he died.”
Another story, related by Mr. Marlowe, which was quite appropriate to the place, was as follows:—
THE GREAT CHESHIRE CHEESES.
The Masons, whose history I used to hear, were among the founders of New Providence, the vanished village of the autumnal Berkshire Hills. I well recall the stories of Elder Leland that I used to hear in my old Swansea home, and especially the awful ghost-story that the courtly evangelist used to relate confidentially to a few friends. No Rhode Island farmer’s boy of thirty years ago will ever forget that, and any allusion to it would make, in those days, young feet nimble in dark chambers and on lonesome roads.
Times have, indeed, changed. No ghost-story, however vivid, would be likely to make a Rhode Island boy nervous to-day.
I recall also the more cheerful story of the great Cheshire Cheese, as we used to hear it, and have often repeated, in my young churning days, the New Providence receipt for turning cream into butter under the miracle-working influence of the old-time dasher:—
“Come, butter, come;
Peter stands at the gate,
Waiting for the butter-cake,
Come, butter, come.”
The rhyme of this persuasive ditty is not perfect, and I am unable to say who “Peter” was, though the name sounds Apostolic; but the Cheshire and Rhode Island farmers’ wives could all declare that this brief invocation gave a wonderful efficacy to the churn-dasher.
I shall never forget my first excursion into Cheshire to visit the once famous farms of New Providence, and the graves of Elder Leland and the heroes of Bennington. It was a glimmering September day, such as brings the tourist of New York to Lenox, not far away.
The sky was an over-sea of gold. The Housatonic lay, here like a mirror of glass in the brown woodland pastures, there purling amid purple gentians over mossy dams.
The wrecks of old orchard trees dotted the landscape; fading beech-trees, with their bark perforated by the long bills of the golden-winged woodpeckers; aftermath in alluvial meadows; cornfields with orange banners on the uplands, and, over all, Greylock, green-wooded and maple-tinted, looking down the valley.
Graveyards—like little villages of the dead—with mossy stones, touched the heart and fancies, and the town at last came full in view, with its white spire and faded inn.
“Where is New Providence?” I asked of an old man who had stopped to rest on the cool russet sward under a leafy maple, where the locusts were singing in the bright air.
“There is no New Providence any more,” said he. “It is all gone: the hotels, the stores, the churches, all—there is not a house left. There is where it was.”
He pointed toward a sunny slope. How beautiful was the situation! But there was not so much as a house or an orchard. Shades of Oliver Goldsmith! Could it be possible that here in New England was a veritable Deserted Village?
“The inhabitants of New Providence all sleep in a little graveyard under the hill,” said the stranger, filling his pipe. “That was once New Providence Purchase, and was settled from Providence Plantations. It is now called Stafford Hill.
“Old Captain Joab Stafford, the hero of Bennington, is buried in the old graveyard, near the road. You can see his grave as you pass by.”
New Providence began in a pleasant joke. Old generous Captain Stafford, who was brought wounded at last from Bennington to his pleasant home and tavern, built his house in New Providence Purchase before he brought his wife from Rhode Island.
When his fine house was completed, he went after Mrs. Stafford, but refused to give her any description of his new place. Across the Connecticut on horseback they hastened toward the mountains.
“Now as we ride along,” said he, “and notice the new settlements, tell me when we come to just such a house as you would like.”
They rode through Cheshire, once called the Kitchen, and at last the good woman lifted her eyes to a bowery hill almost in the shadow of Greylock.
“How beautiful!” said she. “There is just such a home and place as I should like to have. If I could only live there, I would be perfectly satisfied.”
“You shall live there,” said her gallant husband. “That is our home.”
Out of that vanished house he was borne down the hill to his last resting-place in the valley below, and poets and orators spoke his praise.
Elder John Leland, born in Grafton, Massachusetts, in 1754, came to Cheshire when quite a young man. He was on one occasion called upon to speak from the pulpit, when the pastor was absent. There came to him a flow of words and ideas which astonished his hearers much and himself more, and he felt that he was allotted to be a preacher. He was a Baptist-Quaker, like Roger Williams.
INTERIOR VIEW, MANUFACTURES BUILDING.
It has been asserted that his influence made Madison President. He travelled to a distance of many thousand miles, preaching; crowds followed him everywhere, and queer stories of his eccentricities were repeated by every fireside.
Among the old Cheshire humorists and the old story-tellers of the tavern at New Providence, and the half-way inn at Cheshire on the old Boston and Albany stage-route, were gallant Captain Stafford, the Bennington hero, Freelove Mason, the jolly mistress of the first regular stage-route hostelry, William Brown, or “Sweet Billy,”—the “Artemas Ward” of Berkshire,—Elder John Leland, whose jokes were echoed ever by the sounding-board over his tall pulpit, and the rich old farmers by the name of Mason, Brown, Wood, and Cole, and the stage-drivers.
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.”
Elder Leland, tall and courtly, was well adapted to the dramatic part of the occasion. A grander commoner never entered the Republican court. Jefferson had often met the great revival preacher in Virginia, for Leland depopulated towns to listen to his fiery eloquence wherever he went. His calling to the ministry, like Saint Paul’s, had come, as he believed, in the form of a voice out of the skies, and his tongue, to use the old Hebrew simile common in the old days, had been “touched by a burning coal from the altar.”
There are few preachers like Leland to-day. Eloquent as the old Methodist field preachers, elegant and courtly as a Camille Desmoulins, witty as a Swift or Steele, and far in advance of his times in the liberality of his opinions, a theological disciple of Roger Williams and Samson Mason, and a political follower of Jefferson, he was not only a remarkable preacher, but one of the most noted men of his time. He labored as a winter revivalist in Virginia for many years, before he made his home in Cheshire.
It was one of the humors of the time to relate events of a pleasing character in the style of the Hebrew Chronicles, and the Chronicle of the Cheshire Cheese was once well-known in the story-telling town. It began:—
“And Jacknips said unto the Cheshirites, ‘Behold, the Lord hath put a ruler over us that is after our own hearts. Now let us gather together our curds, and carry them into the valley of Elisha, unto his wine-press, and there make a great cheese, that we may make a thank-offering unto the great man.’ Now this saying pleased the Cheshirites, so they did as Jacknips had commanded.”
The great Cheshire Cheese was shared by the President with the governors of several States, to whom samples were sent. The story of it was a great advertisement of Berkshire County; and it was resolved to make a still larger cheese, which should weigh sixteen hundred pounds.
SPANISH BUILDING.
Elder Leland’s church was famous for its psalmody. He himself wrote many hymns, among them the almost Ambrosian tone-picture,—
“The day is past and gone.”
He used sometimes to ascend the pulpit singing.
There was one of the numerous Brown family of Cheshire who was a famous singer in his day, and to him we will assign a popular story of the time. His voice not only filled the church, but went out of the window. His bass notes were deep and full,—“foot-notes,” he called them,—and it was his special pride to inform the people in the then masterpiece of country-church choir music how
“The angel of
The angel of
The Lord came down.
And glory shone around,
And glory
And g-l-o-r-y, etc.”
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.