I really hired Sol because he reminded me of some one I’d known and liked, though I couldn’t just remember at the time who it was; but one day, after he’d been with me about a week, it came to me in a flash that he was the living image of old Bucker, a billy-goat I’d set aheap of store by when I was a boy.  That was a lesson to me on the foolishness of getting sentimental in business.  I never think of the old homestead that echo doesn’t answer, “Give up!”; or hear from it without getting a bill for having been born there.

Sol had started out in life to be a great musician.  Had raised the hair for the job and had kept his finger-nails cut just right for it, but somehow, when he played “My Old Kentucky Home,” nobody sobbed softly in the fourth row.  You see, he could play a piece absolutely right and meet every note just when it came due, but when he got through it was all wrong.  That was Sol in business, too.  He knew just the right rule for doing everything and did it just that way, and yet everything he did turned out to be a mistake.  Made it twice as aggravating because you couldn’t consistently find fault with him.  If you’d given Sol the job of making over the earth he’d have built it out of the latest text-book on “How to Make the World Better,” and have turned out something as correct as a spike-tail coat—­and every one would have wanted to die to get out of it.

Then, too, I never saw such a cuss for system.  Other men would forget costs and prices, but Sol never did.  Seemed he ran his memory by system.  Had a way when there was a change in the price-list of taking it home and setting it to poetry.  Used “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” by A. Tennyson, for a bull market—­remember he began it “Ring Off, Wild Bulls”—­and “Break, Break, Break,” for a bear one.

It used to annoy me considerable when I asked him the price of pork tenderloins to have him mumble through two or three verses till he fetched it up, but I didn’t have any real kick coming till he got ambitious and I had to wait till he’d hummed half through a grand opera to get a quotation on pickled pigs’ feet in kits.  I felt that we had reached the parting of the ways then, but I didn’t like to point out his way too abruptly, because the friend who had unloaded him on us was pretty important to me in my business just then, and he seemed to be all wrapped up in Sol’s making a hit with us.

It’s been my experience, though, that sometimes when you can’t kick a man out of the back door without a row, you can get him to walk out the front way voluntarily.  So when I get stuck with a fellow that, for some reason, it isn’t desirable to fire, I generally promote him and raise his pay.  Some of these weak sisters I make the assistant boss of the machine-shop and some of the bone-meal mill.  I didn’t dare send Sol to the machine-shop, because I knew he wouldn’t have been there a week before he’d have had the shop running on Goetterdaemmerung or one of those other cuss-word