ping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
go back and drink more.

Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
semi-rural neighbourhood.

The "boys" spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.

He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called "the barnyard," in
which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
camels and elephants.

* * * * *

His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
pattern of what he thought it should be.

One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
sick to see it.

"Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that." And he chased me
around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
to make me swallow.

Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
make a man out of me....

My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
could not find me.

It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
backbone tingle with pain.

"Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?"

His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
boldness and began to act timid and fearful.

Whenever I failed