"But this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl."

"With Briddie?"

"It sure does, Mr. Ryan. Didn't I hear your wife tellin' what with the hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' Briddie in the mill this winter as soon as ever she's turned fourteen? Wouldn't you rather they worked her nine hours a day instead o' ten—such a soft little kid with such a lot o' growin' to do? There's a lot of us goin' to fight for a Nine-Hour Bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a manufacturers' representative, like Troy, is goin' to help us? Look at his record! See how he's fought the employees' interests in the legislature! That's a part of his job! He won't vote for no Nine-Hour Bill!"

And the two girls went on to the next tenement.

They were only two of the hundreds of Trade Union girls who were "doing" the First Electoral District (about one-third of St. Louis) on the eve of the primaries. They were thorough. They had the whole district organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by house.

A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?

How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics? It is a three years' story. Let us go back a little.

St. Louis is essentially a conservative city. First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman's town. With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states. She lost her market. This made her slow.

In the 'eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is the great wholesale and jobbing depot, the manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.

And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway, that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity.

"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. Never was anything like our World's Fair in the history of men—never! Look at our parks, too. When we get 'em linked together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.

But what about the employees—the clerks and the factory workers? Have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it a "nice" town to live in?

No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder—for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter—St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.

The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady—and rents are higher than in New York City.

Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.

The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.

Business opportunity has depended much on pliable state and municipal laws. How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know.

We know, too, the period of political reform. People thought the killing trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists' faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. They did not see that the underlying problem is industrial.

After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game. The only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude. They play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights.

Thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.

Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs. As yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in St. Louis.

It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection.

The Women's Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl, Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city.

Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers' Union to the National Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.

For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free.

To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah's return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, time, energy—no!

It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle. Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops.

Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great Southwest.

Night after night for two years Mrs. Knefler and Hannah were out organizing groups of girls. Mrs. Knefler's friends finally stopped remonstrating with her. Hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. Evening after evening her mother protested anxiously, but Hannah, heedless of her own interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups of new girls—American, Russian, Roumanian—a confused mass, to find themselves and pull together.

One June morning in 1910 the papers announced that the Manufacturers' Association and the Business Men's League had decided on E.J. Troy as their candidate to the State Legislature for the First District. His candidacy was also backed by the Republican machine. The papers went on to say that E.J. Troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends, and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority.

That evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the Women's Trade Union League at the Settlement, Mrs. Knefler hurried in: "Girls, have you seen the morning papers? Do you know that we've got E.J. Troy to contend with again?"

At the same moment in dashed Hannah Hennessy by another door, calling out, "Girls, they're goin' to put Troy on the carpet again!"

To both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that's just what they were talking about!

Over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed in detail.

"Yes, 'twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves when we was tryin' to get our Nine-Hour Bill before," reflected a wiry, quick-motioned girl during a second's pause.

"E.J. Troy's got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third, quietly and decisively.

"But how?" asked a more timid officer.

Bing! Mrs. Knefler got into action. There never was a woman for whom a difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. The business meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans.

The girls' first move was to go before the Central Labor Body and ask them to indorse their objections to E.J. Troy. Definite action beyond indorsement the girls did not ask or expect. This much they got.

One day a little later, when Mrs. Knefler's campaign was beginning to take form, a representative of E.J. Troy called Mrs. Knefler on the telephone. The voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. Wouldn't she—that is—ah—er—wouldn't her organization confer with Mr. E.J. Troy? He felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful understanding.

Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr. Troy's previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him. All this in Mrs. Knefler's suavest fashion. She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession. That's why she is such a formidable antagonist.

It was the last week in June—they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion. The newspapers must help, of course.

Mrs. Knefler went to the editors. They were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive. Mrs. Knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman's interests.

What could the papers do? Weren't they in the hands of the "big cinch," as a certain combination of business men in St. Louis is known? Naturally they refused to print a line. You never step on your own toe, do you, or hit yourself in the face—if you can help it?

She planned a campaign that no other St. Louis woman in her class would have had the courage to tackle. Mrs. Knefler is a member of the club that is the St. Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few—only a few—rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage pool.

In such an atmosphere Cynthelia Knefler planned and carried out the biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman ever waged outside a suffrage state. It was done simply because her heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized girls for protection from the greed of organized capital.

There are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and shoulders above our group. So it was with Cynthelia Knefler, brought up in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls' school, steeped in the Southern idea that no "lady" would ever let her picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public speeches was quite unthinkable!

The press was silent, but at least Mrs. Knefler could speak to the labor unions. She and two other women appealed to every labor union in St. Louis with a speech against E.J. Troy. They fought him—not as a man, but as a representative of the "big interests." Mrs. Knefler made seventy-six speeches in that one month before the primaries. That meant hurrying from hall to hall on hot summer nights and making two speeches, and sometimes three and four, while her friends were wearing white muslin and sitting on the gallery, to get the cool of the evening.

There are always some men, though, who are moved only by the big, noisy things of life. Only Schneider's band sounds like music to them; only "Twenty Buckets of Blood, or Dead Man's Gulch" appeals to them as literature; and the only speaker is the man who rips out Old Glory and defies forked lightning. In a political campaign the little red ticket is lost on that kind of man. Mrs. Knefler understood this. So one hot July day huge posters in high, wood-block letters screamed from billboards and the walls of saloons and barber shops and labor halls: "Union men and friends, Scratch E.J. Troy."

All this printing and bill-posting was expensive for working girls. They came back at the Central Labor body again. "Your sympathy is great, but your funds are better," they said.

"You've tackled too big a job," the Labor leaders told the girls, with a benevolent air. "He's the candy around this town—E.J. Troy is. It would take a mint of money to beat E.J. Troy."

However, the Central body instructed the legislative committee of five to give the girls every help, and they did good service. But the Central Body didn't instruct the Committee to go down very far into the treasury.

July was wearing on. The League hurled itself upon the press once more. Surely after so much speech-making and bill-posting the editors would accord them some recognition merely as news. Silence—absolute silence in the next day's papers, and the next.

The day of the primaries was almost come. Now to reach the dull fellows who hadn't seen the cards and the huge posters, who use their eyes only to avoid obstacles. One night, as the factory whistles blew the signal of dismissal, the men in the lines of operators who filed out of shop and mills found themselves mechanically taking and examining this ticket handed them by League girls, who had gone off their job a bit early and had their wages docked in order to work for the larger good.

The Committee of the Central Body was now openly active in their behalf. Men as well as women were passing out the tickets.

Then came the eve of the election. Busy pairs of girls who had already done ten hours' work were going over E.J. Troy's district, with its sections of rich and poor and well-to-do. Throbbing feet that had carried the body's weight ten hot, fatiguing hours hurried up and down the blocks, climbed flight after flight of stairs, and stood at door after door.

"Say, kid, ain't it the limit that a woman can't vote on her own business?" said one girl too another after they had finished the one hundred and forty-fifth family and tried to explain their stake in the election to a bigoted "head of the house."

On the morning of the primaries Mrs. Schurz, as she took the coffee off the stove, remonstrated with her oldest daughter, Minna. "Vat, Minna, you ain't goin' to stay out of de mill today and lose your pay?

"Yes, I be, Mutter," retorted Minna, with a tightening of the lips and a light in her eyre. "I'm goin' to the polls to hand out cards to the voters. I'm goin'. I don't care if I lose my job even."

"Oh, Minna, dat is bad, and me wid four kinder to eat de food. Where is de fleisch and de brot widout your wages?" Mrs. Schurz's heavy face wore the anxious despondence so common to the mothers of the poor.

So at six o'clock Minna joined the relays of working girls who—many of them, like Minna, at personal risk and sacrifice—handed out cards all day to each man who entered. Thus the men were reminded at the last moment of the working woman's stake in the election. "Scratch E.J. Troy" was before their eyes as they crossed their tickets.

Every moment of the day there were alert girls to make this final quiet appeal for justice. They were serious, dignified. There was no jeering, no mirth on the part of the men at the novelty of this campaign—nothing to make any woman self-conscious.

The girls were quiet enough outwardly, but the inner drama was keyed high. Had all their speech-making, placarding, bill-posting and the canvassing of factories, blocks, and primaries—had all their little savings, their risk and personal sacrifice accomplished anything? That was what the girls asked themselves. The thermometer of their hope rose and fell with the rumors of the day. The fathers of the Central Labor Body patted them on the head benevolently and tried to ease their fall, if they were to fall, by saying that anyway it would be something to make Troy run third on his ticket.

Seven o'clock, and the girls were leaving the primaries in twos and threes, tired but excitedly discussing the situation. Between hope and despondency the comment varied on the streets, at the supper-tables, and in the eager, waiting groups of girls on tenement steps and stairs.

At last came the authentic returns. E.J. Troy ran 3,338 votes behind his ticket. With a silent press and practically no money, the working women had defeated one of the most popular men in St. Louis.

A man pledged to the interests of labor legislation won his place. That made the outlook better for the Women's Nine-Hour Bill, and thousands of working girls tumbled into bed, tired, but with new hope.

Every newspaper in St. Louis failed to comment on the victory. The slaves who sit at the editorial desk said they couldn't—they weren't "let." So the most hopeful feature in St. Louis politics has never been commented on by the American press.

Week by week her cheeks grew thinner, her cough more rasping. But after the campaign against Troy was over, she turned with the same intensity of interest to the National Convention of the American Federation of Labor which was to meet there in November. For a year she had been making plans, eager to make this convention a landmark in the history of women's labor. But in November she was in bed by the little grate fire in the family sitting-room. And when convention week came with its meetings a scant three blocks from her home, she could be there in spirit only; she waited restlessly for the girls to slip in after the daily sessions and live them over again for her.

On Thanksgiving Day, between the exhausting strain of high-tension work and the zeal of the young reformer, her beautiful life and brilliant fire were burned out. The committee for the prevention of tuberculosis added her case to their statistics, and the League girls bore her into the lighted church.

In the winter of 1910-11 the leaders of all the labor and social forces of St. Louis, all the organizations for various forms of uplift, united under an able secretary and began their custom of lunching together once a week to discuss the pending social legislation. They played a good game. First, there was the educational effect of their previous legislative campaign to build on. Then there was all the economy and impetus gained from consolidation. They knew the rules of the game better, too. Their plans were more carefully laid and executed.

With a more wary and sophisticated eye on the Manufacturers' Association and a finger in the buttonhole of every legislator, the socially awake of St. Louis have secured more humane child labor legislation, and the Nine-Hour Day for women and children with no exception in favor of shop-keepers.

Knowing the sickening fate of industrial legislation in certain other states when tried before judges whose social vision is fifty years behind the times, the winners of this new bill began to wait tensely enough for its testing. So far, however, the Women's Nine-Hour law has not been contested. It has also been exceptionally well enforced, considering that there are only four factory inspectors for all the myriad shops and mills of this manufacturing city of the Southwest, and only seven factory inspectors for the whole state of Missouri.

St. Louis is another American city where the working women are discovering that they can do things if they only think so.

(The Delineator)

Illustrated by two pen-and-ink sketches made by a staff artist.

Gives the Young Wage-Earner a Fair Working Chance

BY MARY E. TITZEL

The Jones School, the oldest public school building in Chicago, is at Harrison Street and Plymouth Court. When it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their A-B-C's within its walls. Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. But in the Jones School, the process of making influential citizens is still going on. For there the "Job Lady" has her office, her sanctum.

Job Lady is a generic term that includes Miss Anne Davis, director of the Bureau of Vocational Supervision, and her four assistants. The Bureau—which is the newest department of Chicago's school system—is really an employment agency, but one that is different from any other employment agency in the United States. It is concerned solely with a much-neglected class of wage-earners—children from fourteen to sixteen years of age; and its chief purpose is, not to find positions for its "patrons," but to keep them in school.

She discovered—and she can show you statistics to prove it—that "bummin'" around, looking aimlessly for work, brought many a boy and girl, unable to withstand the temptations of the street, into the Juvenile Court. And she found, as other statistics bear witness, that the fate of the children who found jobs was scarcely better than that of their idle brothers and sisters. Undirected, they took the first positions that offered, with the result that most of them were engaged in "blind-alley" occupations, unskilled industries that offered little, if any, chance for advancement and that gave no training for the future. The pay was poor; it averaged two dollars a week. Working conditions were frequently unhealthful. Moral influences of shop and factory and office were often bad. For the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions. This state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the "casual" laborer.

The Bureau—started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the Women's Club, until the Board of Education was ready to adopt it—has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker. But no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the Bureau in operation. Sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the Jones School and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year.

But even when the way has been paved for it, the question, "Why do you want to leave school?" brings to light the most trivial of reasons. In very few cases is it economic necessity that drives a child to work.

"I ain't int'rusted," explained one boy to Miss Davis. "I jest sits."

The Job Lady is often able to convince even the sitters that school is, after all, the best place for boys and girls under sixteen. She persuaded between twenty-five and thirty per cent. of the children that applied at the Bureau last year to return to school. Sometimes all she had to do was to give the child a plain statement of the facts in the case—of the poor work and poor pay and lack of opportunity in the industries open to the fourteen-year-old worker. Often she found it necessary only to explain what the school had to offer. One boy was sent to Miss Davis by a teacher who had advised him to go to work, although he had just completed the seventh grade, because he had "too much energy" for school! He was a bright boy—one capable of making something of himself, if the two important, formative years that must pass before he was sixteen were not wasted; so he was transferred from his school to one where vocational work was part of the curriculum—where he could find an outlet for his superfluous energy in working with his hands. Now he is doing high-school work creditably; and he has stopped talking about leaving school.

Still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen. They are won to the Job Lady's point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen. Or they are brought to see that the schools are for all children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children.

But often all the Job Lady's efforts fail. The child is incurably sick of school, the parent remains obdurate. Or, perhaps, there is a very real need of what little the son or daughter can earn. Often some one can be found who will donate books, or a scholarship ranging from car-fare to a few dollars a week. Over four hundred dollars is being given out in scholarships each month, and every scholarship shows good returns. But often no scholarship is forthcoming; and there is nothing for the Job Lady to do but find a position for the small applicant.

Then begins the often difficult process of fitting the child to some available job. The process starts, really, with fitting the job to the child, and that is as it should be. The Job Lady always tries to place the boys and girls that come to her office where there will be some chance for them to learn something. But jobs with a "future" are few for the fourteen-year-old worker. The trades will not receive apprentices under the age of sixteen; business houses and the higher-grade factories won't bother with youngsters, because they are too unreliable; as one man put it, with unconscious irony, too "childish." So the Job Lady must be content to send the boys out as office and errand boys or to find employment for the girls in binderies and novelty shops. But she investigates every position before a child is sent to fill it; and if it is found to be not up to standard in wages or working conditions, it is crossed off the Bureau's list.

The Job Lady has established a minimum wage of four dollars a week. No children go out from the Bureau to work for less than that sum, excepting those who are placed in the part-time schools of some printing establishments, or in dressmaking shops, where they will be learning a useful trade. This informal minimum-wage law results in a raising of the standard of payment in a shop.

"If you haven't a boy for me now," one man said to Miss Davis, "I'll wait until you get one. It will save time in the end, for you always send just the boy I want."

The secret of finding the right boy lies, first of all, in discovering what he wants to do; and, next, in judging whether or not he can do it. Very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do. He has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live. To many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an "office job" is the acme of desire. It means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass. As a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they scorn the trades.

Into the trades, however, Miss Davis finds it possible to steer many a boy who is obviously unfitted for the career of lawyer, bank clerk, or, vaguely, "business man." And she is able to place others in the coveted office jobs, with their time-honored requirement: "only the neat, honest, intelligent boy need apply."

Often, given the honesty and intelligence, she must manufacture a child to fit the description. Sometimes all that is necessary is a hint about soap and water and a clean collar. Sometimes the big cupboard in her office must yield up a half-worn suit or a pair of shoes that some luckier boy has outgrown. Occasionally, hers is the delicate task of suggesting to a prematurely sophisticated little girl that some employers have an unreasonable prejudice against rouge and earrings; or that even the poorest people can wash their underwear. Manners frequently come in for attention.

Not long ago, I went to a conference on Vocational Guidance. There I heard, from the mouths of various men, what hope the work being done by the Bureau held for the future. One showed how it had infused new blood into the veins of an anemic educational system, how it was making the schools a more efficient preparation for life—the life of factory and shop and office—than they ever had been before.

Another man pointed out that the Bureau, through the schools, would strike at one of the deep roots of poverty—incompetency. More people are poor for lack of proper equipment to earn a living and proper direction in choosing a vocation, he said, than for any other one reason.

A third man saw in the Vocational Bureau a means of keeping a control over employing interests. "You treat our children well, and you pay them well," the schools of the future, he declared, would be able to say to the employer, as the Bureau was already saying, "or we won't permit our children to work for you." A fourth had a vision of what the Bureau and the new education it heralded could do toward educating the men and women of the future to a knowledge of their rights as workers.

And then there came a man with a plea. "All of these things," he said, "the Bureau can accomplish—must accomplish. But let us not forget, in our pursuance of great ends, that it is the essential humanness of the Bureau that has made it what it is."

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.

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.

For Mrs. Frazer is the original of Becky Thatcher, the childhood sweetheart of Tom Sawyer, and the original of Tom Sawyer, of course, was Mark Twain himself.

"Yes, I was the Becky Thatcher of Mr. Clemens's book," Mrs. Frazer said the other day, as she sat in the big second floor front parlor of the old time mansion in Hannibal, which is now the Home for the Friendless. Mrs. Frazer is the matron of the home.

"Of course I suspected it when I first read the 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer,'" she went on. "There were so many incidents which I recalled as happening to Sam Clemens and myself that I felt he had drawn a picture of his memory of me in the character of Judge Thatcher's little daughter. But I never confided my belief to anyone. I felt that it would be a presumption to take the honor to myself.

"There were other women who had no such scruples—some of them right here in Hannibal—and they attempted to gain a little reflected notoriety by asserting that they were the prototypes of the character. When Albert Bigelow Paine, Mr. Clemens's biographer, gathered the material for his life of the author, he found no fewer than twenty-five women, in Missouri and elsewhere, each of whom declared she was Becky Thatcher, but he settled the controversy for all time on Mr. Clemens's authority when the biography was published. In it you will find that Becky Thatcher was Laura Hawkins, which was my maiden name.

"We were boy and girl sweethearts, Sam Clemens and I," Mrs. Frazer said with a gentle little laugh.

She is elderly, of course, since it was seventy years ago that her friendship with Mark Twain began, and her hair is gray. But her heart is young, and she finds in her work of mothering the twenty-five boys and girls in her charge the secret of defying age. On this particular afternoon she wore black and white striped silk, the effect of which was a soft gray to match her hair, and her placid face was lighted with smiles of reminiscence.

If you had seen this lady of Old Missouri as she told of her childhood romance you would have recalled instinctively Mark Twain's description: