As he sat in the doorway, with the sun stealing in upon him, the clock ticking loudly at his back, and the hens scratching round the steps, he began to think with much discomfort about his dead brother and his brother's children.
As to his memories of the past, they may perhaps be transformed here into a short family history, with some details added which had no place in Reuben's mind.

Twenty years before this present date Needham--once Needham's--Farm had been held by Reuben's father, a certain James Grieve.

He had originally been a kind of farm-labourer on the Berwickshire border, who, driven southwards in search of work by the stress of the bad years which followed the great war, had wandered on, taking a job of work here and another there, and tramping many a score of weary miles between, till at last in this remote Derbyshire valley he had found a final anchorage.

Needham Farm was then occupied by a young couple of the name of Pierson, beginning life under fairly prosperous circumstances.

James Grieve took service with them, and they valued his strong sinews and stern Calvinistic probity as they deserved.
But he had hardly been two years on the farm when his young employer, dozing one winter evening on the shafts of his cart coming back from Glossop market, fell off, was run over, and killed.