Godliness

A Tale in Four Parts

There were always three or four old people sitting on
the front porch of the house or puttering about the
garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the old people
were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a colorless,
soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with
thin white hair who was Jesse's uncle.

The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outer-covering
over a framework of logs. It was in reality not one
house but a cluster of houses joined together in a
rather haphazard manner. Inside, the place was full of
surprises. One went up steps from the living room into
the dining room and there were always steps to be
ascended or descended in passing from one room to
another. At meal times the place was like a beehive. At
one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open,
feet clattered on stairs, a murmur of soft 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