But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking, gambling.

Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.

At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could hold, then stepping 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 to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie would cry triumphantly, “Now you have someone to make you be good!”) The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right arm was actually tired.  And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry sobs, incapable of more tears.