wielding the dust cloth Allison
hums "Bing-Binger, the Baritone Singer," has the finest imaginable time and
for several day wears an air of such conscious pride that every paper laid
upon his desk is greeted with a terrible frown.

Musical? Of course. His is the poetic mind, the imaginative, with an
intensely practical, analytical perception--uncanny at times. He is
perfectly "crazy" about operas, reads everything that comes to his
hand--particularly novels--and is an inveterate patron of picture shows.
"Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such
occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed--a
peculiar fact (their rarity) in one so temperamental. After the fifth call
within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A
friend was trying to cheer him.

"Isn't it too bad, Mr. Allison," the friend suggested, "that we can't all
be like the lilies in the field, neither toiling nor spinning, but shedding
perfume everywhere?"

"That lily business is all right," was Allison's retort, "but if I were a
flower it would be just my luck to be a tube-rose and be picked for a
funeral!"

In all our years of association and friendship, I have never known him to
do an unkind or dishonorable act. He is considerate of others,
tender-hearted, sentimental. But, believe me, in "contrariwise," he is
flinty obsidian when it comes to his convictions. Shams and hypocrites and
parading egotists are his particular and especial abomination and when he
gets on the editorial trail of one of that ilk, he turns him inside out and
displays the very secrets of what should be his immortal soul. He is always
poking fun at friends and they laugh with him at what he writes about them,
which recalls one of his earliest and best bits of advice--"never to write
about a man so that others will laugh _at_ him, unless your intention is
deliberately to hurt his feelings. Write so that he will laugh _with_ you."

If I could have one grand wish it would be that everybody could know him as
I do: the man; the book-worm; the toastmaster; the public speaker; the
writer; the sentimentalist; the friend. Absolutely natural and approachable
at all times with never the remotest hint of theatricalism, (unless the
careless tossing over his shoulder of one flap of the cape of a cherished
brown overcoat might be called theatrical), he is yet so many sided and
complex that, without this self-same naturalness