Give the preference to the lean men and the middleweights.  The world is full of smart and rich fat men, but most of them got their smartness and their riches before they got their fat.

Always appoint an hour at which you’ll see a man, and if he’s late a minute don’t bother with him.  A fellow who can be late when his own interests are at stake is pretty sure to be when yours are.  Have a scribbling pad and some good letter paper on a desk, and ask the applicant to write his name and address.  A careful and economical man will use the pad, but a careless and wasteful fellow will reach for the best thing in sight, regardless of the use to which it’s to be put.

Look in a man’s eyes for honesty; around his mouth for weakness; at his chin for strength; at his hands for temperament; at his nails for cleanliness.  His tongue will tell you his experience, and under the questioning of a shrewd employer prove or disprove its statements as it runs along.  Always remember, in the case of an applicant from another city, that when a man says he doesn’t like the town in which he’s been working it’s usually because he didn’t do very well there.

You want to be just as careful about hiring boys as men.  A lot of employers go on the theory that the only important thing about a boy is his legs, and if they’re both fitted on and limber they hire him.  As a matter of fact, a boy is like a stick of dynamite, small and compact, but as full of possibilities of trouble as a car-load of gunpowder.  One bad boy in a Sunday-school picnic can turn it into a rough-house outfit for looting orchards, and one little cuss in your office can demoralize your kids faster than you can fire them.

I remember one boy who organized a secret society, called the Mysterious League.  It held meetings in our big vault, which they called the donjon keep, and, naturally, when one of them was going on, boys were scarcer around the office than hen’s teeth.  The object of the league, as I shook it out of the head leaguer by the ear, was to catch the head bookkeeper, whom the boys didn’t like, and whom they called the black caitiff, alone in the vault some night while he was putting away his books, slam the door, and turn the combination on him.  Tucked away in a corner of the vault, they had a message for him, written in red ink, on a sheep’s skull, telling him to tremble, that he was in the hands of the Mysterious League, and that he would be led at midnight to the torture chamber.  I learned afterward that when the bookkeeper had reached in his desk to get a pen, a few days before, he had pulled out a cold, clammy, pickled pig’s foot, on which was printed:  “Beware! first you will lose a leg!”

I simply mention the Mysterious League in passing.  Of course, boys will be boys, but you mustn’t let them be too cussed boyish during business hours.  A slow boy can waste a lot of the time of a five-thousand-dollar man whose bell he’s answering; and a careless boy can mislay a letter or drop a paper that will ball up the work of the most careful man in the office.