BALLAD of DEAD MEN
If Young Allison is vain of anything he has done I have yet to hear such an expression from him. He just writes things and tucks them away in odd corners and it has devolved upon me to collect them and keep them. So it is that, while not a literary executor—because Allison, thank God, is scandalously healthy and I am making no professions—it falls to my satisfied lot to be a literary collector in a certain sense—if he who gathers and preserves and gloats over the brain products of others may thus be described. That is why, treasured among my earthly possessions—scant enough, the good Lord knows, but full of joy and satisfaction to me—are extensive lead-pencil manuscript memoranda in Allison’s writing showing the painstaking stages by which “Fifteen Dead Men,” characterized by James Whitcomb Riley as that “masterly and exquisite ballad of delicious horrificness,” reached its perfection. Under whatever name it may be sung, be it “The Ballad of Dead Men,” or “On Board the Derelict” or “Derelict,” it is a poem big enough to fix the Jewel of Fame firmly over the author’s brow.