“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. “But there's one thing I remember with more of anger than any other. He used to make me kneel down and pray every night before I went to bed, in his presence; and sometimes he would pray with me. He was a deacon in the church. There are plenty of them on the square--likely most of them are. But this one was the kind you used to see in the old-fashioned melodramas. Truly rural stuff, Jack. He used to be quite a shark at prayer himself, Uncle Ezra did. I can remember how he looked when he prayed, with his eyes shut and his Adam's apple bobbing up and down and the sound whining through his nose.