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.

“Children are wholly unartificial, you know,” she explained.  “They do not learn to conceal their feelings until they begin to grow up.  The courtship of childhood, therefore, is a matter of preference and of comradeship.  I liked Sam better than the other boys, and he liked me better than the other girls, and that was all there was to it.”

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: 

A lovely little blue eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. * * * He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye until he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to “show off” in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration.

And you would have found it easy to conceive that this refined, gentle countenance once was apple cheeked and rosy, that the serene gray eyes once sparkled as blue as the Father of Waters on a sunny day and that the frosted hair was as golden as the sunshine.