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ORANGE CONG. CHURCH 63
preacher. It behooved him thereafter," says the historian, "to classify the nods! '' It is on record that in 1643 Roger Scott, of Lynn, struck the man who waked him up, and was afterward severely whipped to cure him of his sleeping habit.
This Massachusetts transgressor seems to have possessed no more docility than another, of whom we have some account, who belonged to Waterbury. I refer to an incident that occurred in 1760, during the long ministry of the Rev. Mark Leavenworth. There was among Mr. Leavenworth's hearers a person of some standing, who had the infirmity of sleeping in meeting. The preacher, hoping perhaps to cure the evil habit, on one occasion stopped suddenly in his discourse, and calling the sleeper by name, said, "Wake up ! wake up ! " The interruption was not welcome, and the offender answered quickly, "I am not asleep any more than you are, Parson Leavenworth ; so please mind your own business." A great commotion followed. Some were indignant, others amused. Two days after, the delinquent was arraigned, on a grand jury complaint, for profaning the Sabbath by rude talking in time of public worship. He pleaded in extenuation that he had assured his pastor that if he ever called him to account publicly for sleeping he would tell him it was none of his business. But the plea was not accepted, and he was sentenced to pay a fine of five shillings and costs. Evidently, they had not adopted in Waterbury the plan proposed many years before (1662) in Portsmouth, where the town meeting "ordered that a cage be made, or some other means be invented, to punish such as sleep on the Lord's day." The clause, "or some other means be invented," has a suggestion of hopelessness in it,-as if the disease was hard to cure, and the tithing-man's patience exhausted.
I suspect it was in the pulpit rather than the pews that a remedy should have been looked for. We read that in 1646 a fine was laid in Massachusetts, of twenty shillings an hour, for any speech more than one hour long, made by any attorney or person before a court. But I find no such limitation put upon