work his whole life has been
devoted. And if I may speak with well intentioned frankness: He's a damn
good editor, too! However little our lay friends may understand this
message, aside from its emphasis, I rest secure in the thought that to the
brotherhood it opens a wide vista of qualifications to which reams might be
devoted without doing full justice to the subject. Today he might not be
the ideal city editor, or night editor, or managing editor of our great
modern miracle-machines called newspapers, but I have yet to meet the man
who can more quickly absorb, analyze, sum-up and deliver an editorial
opinion, so deliciously phrased and so nicely gauged. He who can do this is
the embodiment of all staff editors!

If I may be pardoned for a moment, I will get myself associated with
Allison and proceed with this relation. In 1888 he left daily newspaper
work to found _The Insurance Herald_, though he continued old associations
by occasional contributions, and in 1899 sold that publication and
established _The Insurance Field_. In the fall of 1902 when presented with
the opportunity of becoming editor-in-chief of _The Daily Herald_ in
Louisville, he gave up temporarily an active connection with _The Insurance
Field_ and in January, 1903, chose me to carry on this latter work, from
which I am thankful to say he was absent only three years.

Allison is newspaper man through and through and was all but born in the
business for he was "a devil in his own home town" of Henderson in a
printing office when thirteen, "Y. E. Allison, Jr., Local Editor" on the
village paper at fifteen and city reporter on a daily at seventeen. Up to
this point in his career I might find a parallel for my own experience, but
there the comparison abruptly ceases. He became a writer while I took to
blacksmithing according to that roystering Chicagoan, Henry Barrett
Chamberlin, who thinks because he once owned a paper called _The Guardsman_
in days when a new subscription often meant breakfast for the two of us,
that he is at liberty to cast javelins at my style of writing. And yet, to
be perfectly frank, I have always been grateful for even _his_ intimation
that I had a "style." Allison once accepted--I can hardly say enjoyed--one
of those subscription breakfasts------But that is a matter not wholly
concerned with his newspaper experience, which has extended through nearly
all the daily "jobs:" reporter and city editor of _The Evansville Journal_,
d