break. Sunrise on Madison Street always was a
wonderful sight. The dingy buildings on that busy old thoroughfare,
awakening to day-life, then appeared as newly painted in the mellow of the
early morning.

My companion knew something was coming. Our chairs were close
together--side by side--and we were looking each in the other's face. He
had his hand back of his ear. "Allison," I said--and I suppose that after a
night in his company I was so impregnated with his strong personality that
I had my hand back of my ear too, and spoke in a low, slightly drawling
nasal, like his--"Allison," I repeated, "don't you miss a great deal by
being deaf?" Now, it is said with tender regret, but a deep and sincere
regard for truth, that my friend makes a virtue of a slight deafness. He
uses it to avoid arguments, assignments, conventions, parlor parties--and
bores--and deftly evades a whole lot of "duty" conversations as well. Of
course I know all this now, but in those days I thought his lack of
complete hearing an infirmity calling for a sort of sympathy on my part.
Anyway it was three o'clock in the morning, and...!

"Well," he replied, after a little pause, "I can't say that I do. You see,
if anyone ever says anything worth repeating, he always tells me about it
anyway." Such is the philosophical trend that makes Allison an original
with a peculiar gift of expression both in the spoken and written word. He
is literary to his finger tips, in the finest sense of the word, for pure
love, his own enjoyment and the pleasure of his friends. There is an
ambition for you! With all his genuine modesty (and he is painfully modest)
by which the light of his genius is hid under even less than the Scriptural
bushel, he has a deep and healthy and honorable respect for fame--not of
the cheap and tawdry, lionizing kind, but fame in an everlasting
appreciation of those who think with their own minds. Almost any pen
portraiture could but skim the surface of a nature so gifted and with which
daily association is so delightful--an association which is a constant
fillip to the mind in fascinating witticisms, in deft characterizations of
men and things, and in deep drafts on memory's storehouse for odd incidents
and unexpected illuminations. A long silence from "Allison's corner" may
precede a gleeful chortle, as he throws on my desk some delicious satirical
skit with a "Well, I've got that out of my system, anyway!"

Allison has a method of prose writi