When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and began to take charge of things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man of twenty-two.  At eighteen he had left home to go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a minister of the Presbyterian Church.  All through his boyhood he had been what in our country was called an “odd sheep” and had not got on with his brothers.  Of all the family only his mother had understood him and she was now dead.  When he came home to take charge of the farm, that had at that time grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and in the nearby town of Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.

There was indeed good cause to smile.  By the standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man at all.  He was small and very slender and womanish of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a long black coat and a narrow black string tie.  The neighbors were amused when they saw him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when they saw the woman he had married in the city.

As a matter of fact, Jesse’s wife did soon go under.  That was perhaps Jesse’s fault.  A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate.  Jesse was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days.  She tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her go on without interference.  She helped to do the milking and did part of the housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food.  For a year she worked every day from sunrise until late at night and then after giving birth to a child she died.

As for Jesse Bentley—­although he was a delicately built man there was something within him that could not easily be killed.  He had brown curly hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and uncertain.  Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature.  His mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child.  Jesse Bentley was a fanatic.  He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer.  Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out of life and he did not know what he wanted.  Within a very short time after he came home to the Bentley farm he made everyone there a little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his mother had been, was afraid also.  At the end of two weeks after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over to him the entire ownership of the place and retired into the background.  Everyone retired into the background.  In spite of his youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of his people.  He was so in earnest in everything he did and said that no one understood him.  He made everyone on the farm work as they