“I was young when I was born. No, that's not one of my silly lines, Jack. I mean it seriously. I was young when I was born. I was born with a jolly disposition. But this uncle of mine took it out of me. I'll say he did! The reason I'm such a kid now, Jack, is because I had to grow up when I was about five years old, and I stayed grown up until I was seventeen or eighteen. I never had a chance to be a boy. If I showed any desire to be it was knocked out of me on the spot. And if I live two hundred years, and stay nineteen years old all that time, Jack, I won't any more than make up for the childhood I missed—that was stolen from me. Frivol? I could frivol a thousand years and not dull my appetite. I want froth, Jack: froth and bubbles!
“This old uncle of mine—he wasn't so old in years when I first knew him, but in his soul he was as old as the overseers who whipped the slaves that built Cheops' pyramid, and as sandy and as flinty—hated me as soon as he saw me. He hated me before he saw me. He would have hated me if he had never seen me, because I was young and happy and careless.
“I was that, when I went to live with him—young and happy and careless. I was five years old. He was my father's brother, Uncle Ezra was, and he beat my father out of money in his dirty, underhanded way. Oh, nothing illegal! At least, I suppose not. Uncle Ezra was too cautious to do anything that might be found out on him. There was nothing that my mother could prove, at any rate, and my father had been careless and had trusted him. When my father died my mother was ill. He gave us a home, Uncle Ezra did. She had to live somewhere; she had to have a roof over her head and attention of some sort. She had no near relations, and I had to be looked after.
“So she and I went into his house to live. It was to be temporary. We were to move as soon as she got better. But she did not live long. I don't remember her definitely as she was before we went to live with Uncle Ezra. I can only see her as she lay on a bed in a dark room before she died. It was a large wooden bed, with wooden slats and a straw mattress. I can see myself sitting on a chair by the head of the bed and talking to her. My feet did not reach to the floor by any means; they only reached to the chair rungs. I can't remember what she said or what I said. All I remember of her is that she had very bright eyes and that her arms were thin. I remember her arms, but not her face, except the eyes. I suppose she used to reach her arms out to me. I think she must have been jolly at one time, too. There is a vague feeling, a remembrance, that before we went to Uncle Ezra's she was jolly, and that she and I laughed and played together in some place where there was red-clover bloom.
“One day when I was siting on the chair, the door opened and Uncle Ezra came in. There was some man with him that was, I suppose, a doctor. I can recall Uncle Ezra's false grin and the way he put his hand on my head—to impress the doctor, I suppose—and the way I pulled away from him. For I felt that he disliked me, and I feared and hated him.
“Yes, Uncle Ezra gave us a home. I don't know how much you know about the rural districts, Jack. But when an Uncle Ezra in a country town gives some one a home he acquires merit. This was a little town in Pennsylvania that Pm talking about, and Uncle Ezra was a prominent citizen—deacon in the church and all that sort of thing. Truly rural drama stuff, Jack, but I can't help that—it's true. Uncle Ezra had a reputation for being stingy and mean. Giving us a home was a good card for him to play. My mother had a little money, and he stole that, too, when she died.
“I suppose he stole it legally. I don't know. It wasn't much. No one had any particular interest in looking out for me, and nobody would want to start anything in opposition to Uncle Ezra in that town if it could be helped anyhow. He didn't have the whole village and the whole of the farming country round about sewed up, all by himself, but he was one of the little group that did. There's a gang like that in every country town, I imagine. He was one of four or five big ducks in that little puddle—lent money, took mortgages and all that kind of thing you read about. I don't know how much he is worth now, counting what he has been stealing all his life. But it can't be a staggering sum. He's too cowardly to plunge or take a long chance. He steals and saves and grinds in a little way. He is too mean and small and blind and limited in his intelligence to be a big, really successful crook, such as you will find in New York City.
“When my mother died, of course, I stayed with Uncle Ezra. I suppose everybody said how good it was of him to keep me, and that it showed a soft and kindly spot in his nature after all, and that he couldn't be so hard as he had the name of being. But I don't see what else could have been done with me, unless he had taken me out and dropped me in the mill pond like a blind cat. Sometimes I used to wish he had done that.
“It isn't hard to put a five-year-old kid in the wrong, so as to make it appear—even to the child himself—that he is bad and disobedient. Uncle Ezra began that way with me. I'm not going into details. This isn't a howl; it's merely an explanation. But he persecuted me in every way. He put me to work before I should have known what work was—work too hard for me. He deviled me and he beat me, he clothed me like a beggar and he fed me like a dog, he robbed me of childhood and of boyhood. I won't go over the whole thing.
“I never had decent shoes, or a hat that wasn't a rag, and I never went to kid parties or anything, or even owned so much as an air rifle of my own. The only pair of skates I ever had, Jack, I made for myself out of two old files, with the help of the village blacksmith—and I got licked for that. Uncle Ezra said I had stolen the files and the straps. They belonged to him.