“Exactly,” said the intruder; “time with you is a commodity of considerable importance.  Minutes, even, have their value.”

“They have,” agreed Mellowkent, looking at his watch.

“That,” said Caiaphas, “is why this book that I am introducing to your notice is not a book that you can afford to be without. Right Here is indispensable for the writing man; it is no ordinary encyclopaedia, or I should not trouble to show it to you.  It is an inexhaustible mine of concise information—­”

“On a shelf at my elbow,” said the author, “I have a row of reference books that supply me with all the information I am likely to require.”

“Here,” persisted the would-be salesman, “you have it all in one compact volume.  No matter what the subject may be which you wish to look up, or the fact you desire to verify, Right Here gives you all that you want to know in the briefest and most enlightening form.  Historical reference, for instance; career of John Huss, let us say.  Here we are:  ’Huss, John, celebrated religious reformer.  Born 1369, burned at Constance 1415.  The Emperor Sigismund universally blamed.’”

“If he had been burnt in these days every one would have suspected the Suffragettes,” observed Mellowkent.

“Poultry-keeping, now,” resumed Caiaphas, “that’s a subject that might crop up in a novel dealing with English country life.  Here we have all about it:  ’The Leghorn as egg-producer.  Lack of maternal instinct in the Minorca.  Gapes in chickens, its cause and cure.  Ducklings for the early market, how fattened.’  There, you see, there it all is, nothing lacking.”

“Except the maternal instinct in the Minorca, and that you could hardly be expected to supply.”

“Sporting records, that’s important, too; now how many men, sporting men even, are there who can say off-hand what horse won the Derby in any particular year?  Now it’s just a little thing of that sort—­”

“My dear sir,” interrupted Mellowkent, “there are at least four men in my club who can not only tell me what horse won in any given year, but what horse ought to have won and why it didn’t.  If your book could supply a method for protecting one from information of that sort it would do more than anything you have yet claimed for it.”

“Geography,” said Caiaphas, imperturbably; “that’s a thing that a busy man, writing at high pressure, may easily make a slip over.  Only the other day a well-known author made the Volga flow into the Black Sea instead of the Caspian; now, with this book—­”

“On a polished rose-wood stand behind you there reposes a reliable and up-to-date atlas,” said Mellowkent; “and now I must really ask you to be going.”

“An atlas,” said Caiaphas, “gives merely the chart of the river’s course, and indicates the principal towns that it passes.  Now Right Here gives you the scenery, traffic, ferry-boat charges, the prevalent types of fish, boatmen’s slang terms, and hours of sailing of the principal river steamers.  If gives you—­”