_Atlantic Monthly_ to comment on the hardship it must have been “to a highly organized man” to be born in southern Indiana in the crude early years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Eggleston declares that he has retained enough of local prejudice to feel that he would have lost more than he could have gained had Plymouth Rock or Beacon Hill been his birthplace rather than Vevay. He was sensitive to the loveliness of the Indiana spring and summer, and has paid tribute to it in words which it is a pleasure to repeat:-- “The sound of the anvil in the smithy, and the soft clatter of remote cow-bells on the ‘commons,’ linger in my mind as memories inseparable from my boyhood in Vevay. A certain poetic feeling which characterized me from childhood, and which, perhaps, finally determined my course toward literary pursuits, was nourished by my delight in the noble scenery about Vevay, Madison, and New Albany, in which places I lived at various times. My brother George and myself were walkers, partly because our father had been one before us. Nothing could be finer than our all-day excursions to the woods in search of hickory-nuts, wild grapes, blackberries, paw-paws, or of nothing at all but the sheer pleasure of wandering in one of the noblest forests that it ever fell to a boy’s lot to have for a playground. Then, too, when we had some business five or twenty miles away, we scorned to take the steamboat, but just set out afoot along the river bank, getting no end of pleasure out of the walk, and out of that sense of power which unusual fatigue, cheerfully borne, always gives.”[42]