with characteristic independence, to abandon fancy for reality. He never became a great novelist, and yet his homely stories of the early Hoosiers, preserving as they do the acrid bite of the persimmon and the mellow flavor of the pawpaw, strengthen the whole case for a discerning and faithful treatment of local life. What he saw will not be seen again, and when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “Roxy” cease to entertain as fiction they will teach as history. The assumption in many quarters that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was in some measure autobiographical was always very distasteful to Dr. Eggleston, and he entered his denial forcibly whenever occasion offered. His own life was sheltered, and he experienced none of the traditional hardships of the self-made man. He knew at once the companionship of cultivated people and good books. His father, Joseph Cary Eggleston, who removed to Vevay, Indiana, from Virginia in 1832, was an alumnus of William and Mary College, and his mother’s family, the Craigs, were well known in southern Indiana, where they were established as early as 1799. Joseph Cary Eggleston served in both houses of the Indiana Legislature, and was defeated for Congress in the election of 1844. His cousin, Miles Cary Eggleston, was a prominent Indiana lawyer, and a judge in the early days, riding the long Whitewater circuit, which then extended through eastern Indiana from the Ohio to the Michigan border. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay, December 10, 1837. His boyhood horizons were widened by the removal of his family to New Albany and Madison, by a sojourn in the backwoods of Decatur County, and by thirteen months spent in Amelia County, Virginia, his father’s former home. There he saw slavery practiced, and he ever afterward held anti-slavery opinions. There was much to interest an intelligent boy in the Ohio Valley of those years. Reminiscences of the frontiersmen who had redeemed the valley from savagery seasoned fireside talk with the spice of adventure; Clark’s conquest had enrolled Vincennes in the list of battles of the Revolution; the battle of Tippecanoe was recent history; and the long rifle was still the inevitable accompaniment of the axe throughout a vast area of Hoosier wilderness. There was, however, in all the towns--Vevay, Brookville, Madison, Vincennes--a cultivated society, and before Edward Eggleston was born a remarkable group of scholars and adventurers had gathered about Robert Owen at New Harmony, in the lower Wabash, and while their experiment in socialism was a dismal failure, they left nevertheless an impression which is still plainly traceable in that region. Abraham Lincoln lived for fourteen years (1816-30) in Spencer County, Indiana, and witnessed there the same procession of the Ohio’s argosies which Eggleston watched later in Switzerland County.