by Ellis Parker Butler, opens to entertaining passage on encyclopedias and telegraphs… ¶ elaborated from a story — "How the Compendium of Universal Knowledge Secured a Maid for Mrs. Tarbro-Smith" — that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (March 25, 1905); the story (and the book) illustrated by May Wilson Preston ¶ see the compendious http://www.ellisparkerbutler.info/ ¶ he seems to have been fortunate in the illustrators of his books — Ethel Hayes!