ft voices arose
and people appeared from a dozen obscure corners.

Besides the old people, already mentioned, many others
lived in the Bentley house. There were four hired men,
a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe, who was in charge of
the housekeeping, a dull-witted girl named Eliza
Stoughton, who made beds and helped with the milking, a
boy who worked in the stables, and Jesse Bentley
himself, the owner and overlord of it all.

By the time the American Civil War had been over for
twenty years, that part of Northern Ohio where the
Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from pioneer
life. Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain.
He had built modern barns and most of his land was
drained with carefully laid the drain, but in order to
understand the man we will have to go back to an
earlier day.

The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for
several generations before Jesse's time. They came from
New York State and took up land when the country was
new and land could be had at a low price. For a long
time they, in common with all the other Middle Western
people, were very poor. The land they had settled upon
was heavily wooded and covered with fallen logs and
underbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing these
away and cutting the timber, there were still the
stumps to be reckoned with. Plows run through the
fields caught on hidden roots, stones lay all about, on
the low places water gathered, and the young corn
turned yellow, sickened and died.

When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers had come into
their ownership of the place, much of the harder part
of the work of clearing had been done, but they clung
to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They
lived as practically all of the farming people of the
time lived. In the spring and through most of the
winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg
were a sea of mud. The four young men of the family
worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of
coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired
beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little
that was not coarse and brutal and outwardly they were
themselves coarse and brutal. On Saturday afternoons
they hitched a team of horses to a three-seated wagon
and went off to town. In town they stood about the
stoves in the stores talking to other farmers or to the
store keepers. They were dressed in overalls and in the
winter wore heavy coats that were flecked with mud.
Thei