“Miss Lydia S. Hall, who is now acting U. S. Treasurer in the absence of the male chief, was once a Lowell factory-girl, and was a contributor to _The Lowell Offering_.... Meeting with some misfortune with regard to titles of property, she went to Washington, and has a clerkship in the Treasury Department since, being also engaged in studying law in order to enable her to secure her property rights in Kansas.... She is a lady of great versatility of talent, and would fill a higher position than the one she now occupies with credit.” Miss Hall’s letters to Lucy Larcom would have thrown much light on her stirring and eventful life, but these were destroyed before I had thought to ask for them. Her married name was Graffam, but whether she is alive or dead, I do not know. HARRIET JANE HANSON. WRITTEN BY LUCY LARCOM.[3] [3] Miss Larcom prepared this sketch for another purpose, two years before she died; and it is substantially the same, with the addition of a few details, which she suggested and permitted me to supply. In these days, when woman’s place in the community, as well as in the family, is coming to be acknowledged; when her abilities in every direction find use and scope; when the labor of her hands, head, and heart is everywhere abundantly honored,--it is well for our younger toilers to see what has been accomplished by those who grew up under circumstances more difficult than those by which they are surrounded. Labor has always been honorable for everybody in our steady-going New England life, but it was not as easy for a young woman to put her mental machinery into working order forty years ago as it is now. Her ambition for the education of her higher faculties was, however, all the greater for the check that was put upon it by the necessities of a longer day’s toil and the smaller compensation of the older time. It is one of the wholesome laws of our nature that we value most that which we most persistently strive after through obstacles and hindrances. The author of “The New Pandora” is an illustration of what has been done by one such woman, the development of whose mind began as a child in the Lowell cotton-mills. The book is commended by reviewers as an admirably written composition, a beautiful and successful dramatic poem of woman, the result of ripe years of thought. Mrs. Robinson’s maiden name was Harriet Jane Hanson, and she is by “long descent” of good New England parentage. Her father, William Hanson, was descended from the ancestor who first settled in Dover, N.H.--one of a long line of English Quakers. He was a carpenter, and learned his trade of Peter Cudworth, on Merrimac Street in Boston.