This is one of the later stories, published in 1945, and it is clearly a post-war setting story written before the post-war era had really begun. The protagonist is a wounded veteran now recovering back home on a farm. The cars and mail system sound 1930's, and the desription of the war planes flying overhead coming from a nearby military base sound early war time -- the scale of the plane maneuvers being described is too small to reflect late war reality. This is the same style of thinking and description that inspired Ma and Pa Kent and Smallville in the 1950's/60's descriptions of Superman. (The 2000's TV Smallville era is something entirely different.)
This also addresses a big concern of the late-war era: What would the soldiers do when peace came again? The previous great war transition, from WWI, had been deeply unstable and finally produced the Great Depression, which had produced this war, WWII. People from all walks of life in America and Europe were looking long and hard for a better way to end this war.
Jones twists in a new, hopeful, education technology: learning by mail. (The GI Bill had only been passed in 1944, so its effects were still unknown.) Mail catalog advertising was fifty years old by this era so the advertising pitch Jim Ward, the protagonist, gets in the advertising letter sounds pretty familiar.
It's a "right neighborly relation" that's being portrayed here between Ward and his neighbors, the mailman in particular. This kind of relation became the meat-and-potatoes of "The Andy Griffith Show" on TV in the 1960's.
Boy, oh boy! This is rural and 1930's-feeling. This man is walking out of this small Iowa town with little more than a railroad stop into surrounding farmland -- no horse, no carriage, no taxi. He thinks nothing of it, nor do the townsfolk, even though just months earlier he was using a cane.
The alien's story of how he got to Earth is touching and inventive. I like it. It's a bit contrived that he is telepathic and in a hurry to return because he's injured, but on the whole I like it. And Jones uses it to end the story well. I liked it the first time, I like it now.