The Days of a Man Dssi 



Edwards 



My only other brother, Hawley, died in infancy. 

 Mary Maty, a very inteUigent and handsome girl three 

 Jordan^ years younger than I, was the third woman to enter 

 Cornell University. There she became engaged to 

 Edward Junius Edwards, a former fellow student at 

 Lombard University, where I taught for a year 

 after graduating from college. Minneapolis has long 

 been her home. For some years before his death in 

 191 5, her husband interested himself in genealogy, 

 and during the process of working out his children's 

 ancestry, half of which was also mine, he brought to 

 light many unknown or forgotten details of family 

 origin and connections. Mrs. Edwards is the mother 

 of six, Arthur (Stanford, 1900), Paul, Junius, Flora 

 (Mrs. Bailey), Marjorie (Mrs. Blake), and Mary 

 Edwards. 



Birth- I was bom on the 19th day of January, 1851, in 



■place the old brown farmhouse, left unpainted in my boy- 

 hood to save money so that we children might be 

 educated. Originally — that is, in the early days 

 before my father bought the farm — it had been a 

 wayside inn, a habit never quite abandoned. It 

 stood on the county road one mile northeast of the 

 village of Gainesville, fifty miles south of Roch- 

 ester, and sixty southeast of Buffalo. Vines covered 

 the front of the house, and I therefore used some- 

 times to say that. "I became a botanist in self-de- 

 fense." 



The Gainesville of my day consisted chiefly of two 

 long streets meeting at a right angle. Just south of 

 their junction a large stream. East Coy Creek, flowed 

 obliquely through the town on its way to the Genesee 



