"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 writing all his own. If you could see him day in and out, you would soon recognize the symptoms. An idea strikes him; he becomes abstracted, reads a great deal, pull down books, fills pages of particularly ruled copy paper with figures from a big, round, black pencil until you might think he was calculating the expenditures of a Billion Dollar Congress. He is not a mathematician but, like Balzac, simply dotes on figures. Then comes the analytical stage and that he performs on foot, walking, head bent forward, upstairs, downstairs, outdoors, around the block, in again, through the clattering press room and up and down the hall. When the stride quickens and he strikes a straight line for his desk, his orderly mind has arranged and classified his subject down to the illuminating adjectives even and the whole is ready to be put on paper. Though his mind is orderly, his desk seldom is. He is the type of old-school editor who has everything handy in a profound confusion. He detests office system, just as he admires mental arrangement. I got a "rise" out of him only once when making a pretence of describing his very complex method of preserving correspondence, and then he flared: "It saved us a lot of trouble, didn't it?" The fact was patent, but the story is apropos. Allison was complaining to a friend of office routine.