I learned a long while ago not to measure men with a foot-rule, and not to hire them because they were young or old, or pretty or homely, though there are certain general rules you want to keep in mind.  If you were spending a million a year without making money, and you hired a young man, he’d be apt to turn in and double your expenses to make the business show a profit, and he’d be a mighty good man; but if you hired an old man, he’d probably cut your expenses to the bone and show up the money saved on the profit side; and he’d be a mighty good man, too.  I hire both and then set the young man to spending and the old man to watching expenses.

Of course, the chances are that a man who hasn’t got a good start at forty hasn’t got it in him, but you can’t run a business on the law of averages and have more than an average business.  Once an old fellow who’s just missed everything he’s sprung at gets his hooks in, he’s a tiger to stay by the meat course.  And I’ve picked up two or three of these old man-eaters in my time who are drawing pretty large salaries with the house right now.

Whenever I hear any of this talk about carting off old fellows to the glue factory, I always think of Doc Hoover and the time they tried the “dead-line-at-fifty” racket on him, though he was something over eighty when it happened.

After I left Missouri, Doc stayed right along, year after year, in the old town, handing out hell to the sinners in public, on Sundays, and distributing corn-meal and side-meat to them on the quiet, week-days.  He was a boss shepherd, you bet, and he didn’t stand for any church rows or such like nonsense among his sheep.  When one of them got into trouble the Doc was always on hand with his crook to pull him out, but let an old ram try to start any stampede-and-follow-the-leader-over-the-precipice foolishness, and he got the sharp end of the stick.

There was one old billy-goat in the church, a grocer named Deacon Wiggleford, who didn’t really like the Elder’s way of preaching.  Wanted him to soak the Amalekites in his sermons, and to leave the grocery business alone.  Would holler Amen! when the parson got after the money-changers in the Temple, but would shut up and look sour when he took a crack at the short-weight prune-sellers of the nineteenth century.  Said he “went to church to hear the simple Gospel preached,” and that may have been one of the reasons, but he didn’t want it applied, because there wasn’t any place where the Doc could lay it on without cutting him on the raw.  The real trouble with the Deacon was that he’d never really got grace, but only a pretty fair imitation.

Well, one time after the Deacon got back from his fall trip North to buy goods, he tried to worry the Doc by telling him that all the ministers in Chicago were preaching that there wasn’t any super-heated hereafter, but that each man lived through his share of hell right here on earth.  Doc’s face fell at first, but he cheered up mightily after nosing it over for a moment, and allowed it might be so; in fact, that he was sure it was so, as far as those fellows were concerned—­they lived in Chicago.  And next Sunday he preached hell so hot that the audience fairly sweat.