the world of men, mingled with many races, sailed seas,
climbed mountains, lived in metropoles, and dined with
princes.

Brann's most notable personal acquaintances were country-
town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a
hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of
the world. He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily
unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and
the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement
was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most
spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's
most worthy resident representative, William Marion Reedy.

So environed, in a time when the bicycle marked the acme
of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed
Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college
and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers,"
Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as
Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and
bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made
by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the
Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren
ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars of
bullet-answering bigotry.

But vain are the might-have-beens; and fortunate are we to
have as we have the stuff out of which far-ringing fame
resounds unto generations when teeth are no longer set on
edge--when men will have forgotten the taboos of a little