Reuben knew Jesse Plum's history in a general way. The old man had arrived from England as an indentured servant some time in the early 1670's, a long-jawed hulk with certain fixed ideas, one of which was that nobody loved him any more than you could put in your eye and see never the worse. After his first term of servitude he had drifted to Springfield and cemented himself to Grandfather Matthew Cory's family with the suctorial power of the meek. Reuben knew that in the same year when his father and mother were married and came to Deerfield, Grandfather Cory died, and after his death Grandmother Rachel Cory had no place for a godless sot; her son at Deerfield casually inherited Jesse, and Jesse did nobly, working for his keep and a trifle over, aware that Goodman Joseph Cory could seldom be stern toward anyone but himself. Jesse's thin nose, wedged between gently wandering milky blue eyes, possessed an intuition for alcohol, as a good bloodhound's nose will hold him firm on the trail. Jesse never rebelled nor complained. His mention of the Pain in his Back was simply a special kind of breathing with words, his muscle the sort of unlovely boot-leather that can always beat out one more day's wear. He tended to be somewhere else at plowing-time, and Reuben had seen him approach overt emotion in the presence of a woodpile, but he never failed at harvest--Jesse was doing his best and said so himself. A neighbor, Benoni Stebbins, observing Jesse's slowly receding back, once declared in Reuben's hearing that some men are born tired--the charitable heart can only hope they'll find time for enough rest before Judgment. Jesse talked most colorfully when resting; Jesse was a man of memories. In youth he had known the Great Plague of 1665 and the fire that laid London flat the following year; of these he almost never spoke, but he loved to croak on by the hour with less sorrowful recollections of the motherland.