Joseph Eggleston had foreseen his own death and provided in various ways for the education of his sons. He purchased a scholarship in Asbury (DePauw) College, but continued ill health made it impossible for Edward to avail himself of its benefits, though his younger brother, George Cary, became a student there. Just what Edward Eggleston lost by his irregular schooling, which was almost wholly independent of instructors in the usual sense of the term, is hardly a profitable subject for speculation. By following his own bent, he strengthened himself along lines of natural preference, and he formed that habit of wise selection and rejection which in itself marks the educated man. Although schoolhouse doors were closed against him on account of his precarious health, he was nevertheless permitted to court death by close application in home study. He acquired, by the time he reached his twenty-fifth year, some knowledge of six or seven languages, and a familiar acquaintance with classical English and French poetry. He knew both the English and French dramatic literature, though, having been bred in the strictest teaching of the Methodists of that day, he read few novels, and he gives his own testimony that he should have esteemed it “a damnable sin to see a play on the stage.” When Edward Eggleston was in his twelfth year, his mother remarried, taking for her husband the Rev. William Terrell, a Methodist minister. This change brought with it a wider horizon for the boy, as his stepfather’s duties led the family away from Vevay to Madison and New Albany, also on the Ohio, but larger towns than Vevay. When sixteen, he spent more than a year with his father’s family in Virginia. The sharp transition from the conditions in the newer to those of the older country quickened his powers of observation. The tribulations of the Western pioneers had been discussed in his hearing by his elders during the most impressionable years of his childhood; his grandfather Craig’s stone house was a reminder of times not remote when the Indians were a daily menace; and the recitals of the wandering apostles of Methodism in his mother’s house had given him further contact with the adventure and romance of pioneer life. Virginia opened new vistas, and the novel conditions of life that he found there extended his knowledge of men and manners, and afforded an opportunity for criticism and comparison that was of definite value. He found himself cousin to a considerable part of the population, and this wide relationship gave him an acquaintance with the charming social life of old Virginia; but he counted himself an abolitionist, he says, from the time of this visit.