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William Sims Allen, who died in Pacific, Mo., March 4, 1920, was born in Franklin County, N. C., the eldest son of Joseph Farrar and Olive Sims Allen, of honored and beloved memory. He was educated at the famous Male Academy, of Louisburg, which is still standing in the grove of stately old oaks, thought more than a hundred years old. To many classmates of that bygone period it is still echoing with the fine wit and magnificent leadership of their one and incomparable hero, Bill Allen. A tall, fair chieftain, standing six feet six inches in his socks, a perfectly proportioned young Hercules, with kindly beaming blue eyes and smiling face, he was the Nestor, the complete embodiment of all that was admirable in the eyes and hearts of the big student body of that bygone day. He was not only the wit of the school, but an inimitable mimic, a matchless athlete, yet was never known to use his strength of mind or body upon an inferior. He was always on the side of the weak, and in the schoolroom he was as dignified as a Chesterfield. Time, with its leveling processes, has failed to dim the luster of his fame to the thin line of his surviving comrades.

In 1861, when Franklin County sent the pride and flower of her young manhood to fight for our Southland, Bill Allen enlisted in the Franklin Rifles and followed its fortunes throughout the entire war with high courage and unfaltering zeal. When the unspeakable days of Reconstruction were meted out to the South, he left his native State and bought and formed a home in the Far West, from which he died, as he had lived, an unselfish, noble-hearted son of the Old South. Following the trend of his versatile mind, he chose the teachers' profession, made an enviable name for himself, reared a family of honorable and gifted sons, and now at the close of a useful life has at last realized all the prophets and poets dreamed of greatness and goodness of God, for surely "eternity is the great remedy for time, heaven is the cure of earth."

[Classmate W. C. Person, Orlando, Fla.]