An elderly rancher took some fine Kentucky horses to the West in the early sixties.  He was proud of them, and justly so.  The old gentleman’s son had once seen a teamster lock one of his wagon-wheels in going down a declivity.  This precaution appealed to the young fellow’s idea of “safety first.”  He duly reported the occurrence to his father, and begged him to get a, lock-chain.

“My son,” said the old gentleman, “if I ever send you out with a team that can’t outrun the wagon, let ’em go to hell.”

SOLICITOR (to business man absorbed in detail)—­“I have here a most marvelous system of efficiency, condensed into one small volume.  It will save you fully 50 per cent of your time, and so—­”

BUSINESS MAN (interrupting irritably)—­“I already have a system by which I can save 100 per cent of my time and yours.  I’ll demonstrate it now—­Good-day!”

The hours I spend at work, dear heart
Are as arithmetic to me;
I count my motions every one apart—­
Efficiency.

Each hour a task, each task a test,
Until my heart with doubt is wrung;
I conservate my darndest, but at best
The boss is stung.

O theories that twist and turn! 
O frantic gain and laggard loss! 
I’ll standardize and stint at last to learn

To please the boss
By gum! 
To please the boss.

“But,” he adds, “as in everything else, there are exceptions.  There was Boggins, for instance.  Boggins was a great efficiency man in the office, but even more so at home.  Why, every time Boggins Junior was naughty his father laid him on the floor and spread a rug over him, so that the beating would kill two birds with one stone, as you might say.”

A worm won’t turn if you step on it right.

Efficiency is an admirable quality, but it can be overdone, according to Representative M. Clyde Kelly, of Pennsylvania.

“Last election day,” Mr. Kelly explains, “the city editor of my newspaper in Braddock sent his best reporter out to learn if the saloons were open in defiance of the law.  Four days later he returned and reported, ‘They were.’”

“Sambo, I don’t understand how you can do all your work so quickly, and so well.”

“I’ll tell yuh how ’tis, boss.  I sticks de match ob enthusiasm to de fuse ob yenergy—­and jes natchurally explodes, I does.”

“Don’t be so long-winded in your reports as you have been in the past,” said the manager of the “Wild West” railway to his overseer.  “Just report the condition of the track as ye find it, and don’t put in a lot of needless words that ain’t to the point.  Write a business letter, not a love-letter.”

A few days later the railway line was badly flooded, and the overseer wrote his report to the manager in one line:  “Sir—­Where the railway was the river is.—­Yours faithfully,——.”

In Montana a railway-bridge had been destroyed by fire, and it was necessary to replace it.  The bridge-engineer and his staff were ordered in haste to the place.  Two days later came the superintendent of the division.  Alighting from his private car, he encountered the old master bridge-builder.