My Remarkable Uncle and other Sketches

The most remarkable man I have ever known in my life was my uncle, Edward
Philip Leacock--known to ever so many people in Winnipeg fifty or sixty
years ago as E.P. His character was so exceptional that it needs nothing
but plain narration. It was so exaggerated already that you couldn't
exaggerate it.

When I was a boy of six, my father brought us, a family flock--to settle
on an Ontario farm. We lived in an isolation unknown, in these days of
radio, anywhere in the world. We were thirty-five miles from a railway.
There were no newspapers. Nobody came and went. There was nowhere to come
and go. In the solitude of the dark winter nights the stillness was that
of eternity.

Into this isolation there broke, two years later, my dynamic Uncle
Edward, my father's younger brother. He had just come from a year's
travel around the Mediterranean. He must have been about twenty-eight,
but seemed a more than adult man, bronzed and self-confident, with a
square beard like a Plantagenet King. His talk was of Algiers, of the
African slave market, of the Golden Horn and the Pyramids. To us it
sounded like the Arabian Nights. When we asked, 'Uncle Edward, do you
know the Prince of Wales?' he answered, 'Quite intimately,' with no
further explanation. It was an impressive trick he had.

In that year, 1878, there was a general election in Canada. E.P. was in
it up to the neck in less than no time. He picked up the history and
politics of Upper Canada in a day, and in a week knew everybody in the
countryside. He spoke at every meeting, but his strong point was the
personal contact of electioneering, of bar-room treats. This gave full
scope for his marvellous talent for flattery and make-believe. 'Why, let
me see,' he would say to some tattered country specimen beside him, glass
in hand, 'surely, if your name is Framley, you must be a relation of my
dear friend General Sir Charles Framley of the Horse Artillery?' 'Mebbe,'
the flattered specimen would answer, 'I guess, mebbe; I ain't kept track
very good of my folks in the old country.' 'Dear me! I must tell Sir
Charles that I've seen you. He'll be so pleased...' In this way, in a
fortnight E.P. had conferred honours and distinctions on half the
township of Georgina. They lived in a recaptured atmosphere of generals,
admirals and earls. Vote? How else could vote than conservative, men of
family like them!

It goes without saying that in politics, then and always, E.P. was on the
conservative, the aristocratic side, but along with that was
hail-fellow-well-met with the humblest. This was instinct. A democrat
can't condescend. He's down already. But when a conservative stoops, he
conquers.

The election, of course, was a walk-over. E.P. might have stayed to reap
the fruits. But he knew better. Ontario at that day was too small a
horizon. For these were the days of the hard times of Ontario farming,
when mortgages fell like snow-flakes, and farmers were sold up, or sold
out, or went 'to the States,' or faded humbly underground.