Years hence, gray-haired men who were little boys in this procession will tell their grandchildren how this stage tore through Mud Springs, and how Horace Greeley's bald head ever and anon showed itself like a wild apparition above the coach-roof. Mr. Monk was on time. There is a tradition that Mr. Greeley was very indignant for a while: then he laughed and finally presented Mr. Monk with a brand-new suit of clothes. Mr. Monk himself is still in the employ of the California Stage Company, and is rather fond of relating a story that has made him famous all over the Pacific coast. But he says he yields to no man in his admiration for Horace Greeley. SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682) BY FRANCIS BACON When Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was asked to furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in Wood's 'Athenæ Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as "Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London," the date of his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he had printed; and ended with "Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be published." This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in details than the requirements of a census-taker's blank, may serve, with many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self. He seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day--that "fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment"--has trained to the most noxious degree of offensiveness. [Illustration: SIR THOMAS BROWNE] Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select company--"fit audience though few"--who are students of the 'Religio Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and conditions, his "separable accidents," affairs of assimilation and secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer and tailor, his cook and his laundress. The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources--his own note-books, domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers and the works of subsequent biographers--all that we are likely, this side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.