UPON the first day of January in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-six, just a hundread years after Thomas Jefferson's virile if erroneous statement of man's inalienable rights and equalities, there was born into this vale of tears and laughter and buncombe, and more particularly into the family of the Reverend Mr. Eaton, of Bartow-on-the-Sound, Westchester County, New York, a male child who was promptly christened Edward, in honor of the Confessor—from whom Mrs. Eaton, the child's mother, was able to trace her descent—with whose life, so far as it has been lived, this narrative will chiefly concern itself.
Generally speaking, the life of any man born in the year 1876 and surviving to the present day is a history of that man's relations to women; particular women, and woman in the mass. And it will be found that the history of Edward Eaton has been no exception to the rule.
