Max Brand

The Night Horseman Max Brand

At the age of six Randall Byrne could name and bound every state in the Union andgive the date of its admission; at nine he was conversant with Homeric Greek andCaesar; at twelve he read Aristophanes with perfect understanding of the allusionsof the day and divided his leisure between Ovid and Horace; at fifteen, wearied bythe simplicity of Old English and Thirteenth Century Italian, he dipped into thehistory of Philosophy and passed from that, naturally, into calculus and the highermathematics; at eighteen he took an A. B. from Harvard and while idling away apleasant summer with Hebrew and Sanscrit he delved lightly into biology and itskindred sciences, having reached the conclusion that Truth is greater thanGoodness or Beauty, because it comprises both, and the whole is greater than anyof its parts; at twenty-one he pocketed his Ph. D. and was touched with the fever ofhis first practical enthusiasm-surgery. At twenty-four he was an M. D. and adistinguished diagnostician, though he preferred work in his laboratory in hisendeavor to resolve the elements into simpler forms; also he published at this timea work on anthropology whose circulation was limited to two hundred copies, andhe received in return two hundred letters of congratulation from great men whohad tried to read his book; at twenty-seven he collapsed one fine spring day on thefloor of his laboratory. That afternoon he was carried into the presence of a greatphysician who was also a very vulgar man. The great physician felt his pulse andlooked into his dim eyes.