EARNEST YOUNG MAN—­“Have you any advice to a struggling young employee?”

FRANK OLD GENTLEMAN—­“Yes.  Don’t work.”

EARNEST YOUNG MAN—­“Don’t work?”

FRANK OLD GENTLEMAN—­“No.  Become an employer.”

General Benjamin F. Butler built a house in Washington on the same plans as his home in Lowell, Mass., and his studies were furnished in exactly the same way.  He and his secretary, M. W. Clancy, afterward City Clerk of Washington for many years, were constantly traveling between the two places.

One day a senator called upon General Butler in Lowell and the next day in Washington to find him and his secretary engaged upon the same work that had occupied them in Massachusetts.

“Heavens, Clancy, don’t you ever stop?”

“No,” interposed General Butler,

  “’Satan finds some michief still
  For idle hands to do.’”

Clancy arose and bowed, saying: 

“General, I never was sure until now what my employer was.  I had heard the rumor, but I always discredited it.”

W.J. ("Fingy”) Conners, the New York politician, who is not precisely a Chesterfield, secured his first great freight-handling contract when he was a roustabout on the Buffalo docks.  When the job was about to begin he called a thousand burly “dock-wallopers” to order, as narrated by one of his business friends: 

“Now,” roared Conners, “yez are to worruk for me, and I want ivery man here to understand what’s what.  I kin lick anny man in the gang.”

Nine hundred and ninety-nine swallowed the insult, but one huge, double-fisted warrior moved uneasily and stepping from the line he said “You can’t lick me, Jim Conners.”

“I can’t, can’t I?” bellowed “Fingy.”

“No, you can’t” was the determined response.

“Oh, well, thin, go to the office and git your money,” said “Fingy.”  “I’ll have no man in me gang that I can’t lick.”

Outside his own cleverness there is nothing that so delights Mr. Wiggins as a game of baseball, and when he gets a chance to exploit the two, both at the same time, he may be said to be the happiest man in the world.  Hence it was that the other day, when little red headed Willie Mulligan, his office boy, came sniffing into his presence to ask for the afternoon off that he might attend his grandfather’s funeral, Wiggins deemed it a masterly stroke to answer: 

“Why, certainly, Willie.  What’s more, my boy, if you’ll wait for me I’ll go with you.”

“All right, sir,” sniffed Willie as he returned to his desk and waited patiently.

And, lo and behold, poor little Willie had told the truth, and when he and Wiggins started out together the latter not only lost one of the best games of the season, but had to attend the obsequies of an old lady in whom he had no interest whatever as well.

CHIEF CLERK (to office boy)—­“Why on earth don’t you laugh when the boss tells a joke?”