* * * * *

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.