Here was the final, immeasurable measure of its success.  It counts, of course, that the Job Lady helps along big causes, drives at the roots of big ills; but, somehow it counts more that an anxious-faced youngster I saw at the Bureau should have brought his woes to her.  His employer had given him a problem to solve—­and he couldn’t do it.  He was afraid he’d lose his job.  He had never been to the Bureau before, but “a boy you got a job for said you’d help me out,” he explained—­and he was sent off happy, the problem solved.

It counts too, that Tillie, who had once found work through the Bureau, but was now keeping house for her father, should turn to the Bureau for aid.  Her father had been sick and couldn’t afford to buy her anything new to wear.  “My dress is so clumsy,” she wrote, “that the boys laugh at me when I go out in the street.”  She was confident that the Job Lady would help her—­and her confidence was not misplaced.  It counts that the Jameses and Henrys and Johns and Marys and Sadies come, brimming over with joy, to tell the Job Lady of a “raise” or of a bit of approbation from an employer.  All the funny, grateful, pathetic letters that pour in count unspeakably!

To hundreds of boys and girls and parents the Job Lady has proved a friend.  There has been no nonsense about the matter.  She has not sentimentalized over her work; she has not made it smack of charity.  Indeed, there is no charity about it.  The boys and girls and parents who come to the Job Lady are, for the most part, just average boys and girls and parents, as little paupers as millionaires.  They are the people who are generally lost sight of in a democracy, where one must usually be well-to-do enough to, buy assistance, or poor enough to accept it as alms, if he is to have any aid at all in solving the problems of life.

It is a great thing for the schools, through the Bureau, to give to these average men and women and children practical aid in adjusting their lives to the conditions under which they live and work, and to do it with a sympathy and an understanding—­a humanness that warms the soul.

* * * * *

(Kansas City Star)

Two illustrations with the captions: 
  1.  “Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,” an Illustration in
     the “Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (Harpers), which met the
     Author’s Approval.

  2.  Mrs. Laura Frazer, the Original “Becky Thatcher,” Pouring
     Tea at Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Mo.,
     on the Anniversary of the Author’s Birth.

MARK TWAIN’S FIRST SWEETHEART, BECKY THATCHER, TELLS OF THEIR CHILDHOOD
COURTSHIP

To Mrs. Laura Frazer of Hannibal, Mo., Mark Twain’s immortal “Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a rosary, and the book’s plot is the cord of fiction on which beads of truth are strung.  In the sunset of her life she tells them over, and if here and there among the roseate chaplet is a bead gray in coloring, time has softened the hues of all so they blend exquisitely.  This bead recalls a happy afternoon on the broad Mississippi with the boys and girls of seventy years ago; the next brings up a picture of a schoolroom where a score of little heads bob over their books and slates, and a third visualizes a wonderful picnic excursion to the woods with a feast of fried chicken and pie and cake.