Edward Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, December 10, 1837. His father, a member of an old Virginia family, after a brilliant course at William and Mary College, had migrated westward, settled in Indiana, and just as he was making himself a notable figure in the law and the politics of his State, had died when his eldest son, Edward, was but nine years old. The son had inherited both his father's intellectual brilliancy and his frail physique. Though eager for knowledge, he was able all through his boyhood to attend school but little, and, though his father had provided for a college scholarship, the son never found himself able to take advantage of it. He was largely self-educated. He studied whenever he could, and by making use of all his opportunities he was able before he was twenty to master by himself nearly all of the branches required for a college degree. His boyhood was a wandering one. After the death of his father, the family removed to New Albany and later to Madison. At the age of thirteen he was sent to southern Indiana to live with an uncle, a large landowner, and it was here in the lowlands of Decatur County that he had his first chance to study those primitive Hoosier types that later he was to make permanent in literature. Still later he lived for a year and a half with his father's people in Virginia. Before he was nineteen he had chosen his profession. The tense Methodist atmosphere in which he had been reared had had its effect. He would be a preacher, a circuit rider, one of those tireless latter-day apostles that had formed so picturesque a part of his boyhood. "How did he get his theological education? It used to be said that Methodist preachers were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew; but besides this oral instruction [he] carried in his saddle bags John Wesley's simple, solid sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns, and a Bible."[60]