“I must have been 6 or 7 years old when we moved to Hannibal,” Mrs. Frazer said.  “My father had owned a big mill and a store and a plantation worked by many negro slaves further inland, but he found the task of managing all too heavy for him, and so he bought a home in Hannibal and was preparing to move to it when he died.  My mother left the mill and the plantation in the hands of my grown brothers—­I was one of ten children, by the way—­and came to Hannibal.  Our house stood at the corner of Hill and Main streets, and just a few doors west, on Hill Street, lived the Clemens family.

“I think I must have liked Sam Clemens the very first time I saw him.  He was different from the other boys.  I didn’t know then, of course, what it was that made him different, but afterward, when my knowledge of the world and its people grew, I realized that it was his natural refinement.  He played hookey from school, he cared nothing at all for his books and he was guilty of all sorts of mischievous pranks, just as Tom Sawyer is in the book, but I never heard a coarse word from him in all our childhood acquaintance.

“Hannibal was a little town which hugged the steamboat landing in those days.  If you will go down through the old part of the city now you will find it much as it was when I was a child, for the quaint old weatherbeaten buildings still stand, proving how thoroughly the pioneers did their work.  We went to school, we had picnics, we explored the big cave—­they call it the Mark Twain Cave now, you know.”

“Were you lost in the cave, as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were?” Mrs. Frazer was asked.

“No; that is a part of the fiction of the book,” she answered.  “As a matter of fact, some older persons always went with us.  Usually my older sister and Sam Clemens’s older sister, who were great friends, were along to see that we didn’t get lost among the winding passages where our candles lighted up the great stalagmites and stalactites, and where water was dripping from the stone roof overhead, just as Mr. Clemens has described it.”

And then she proceeded to divorce the memory of Mark Twain from “the little red schoolhouse” forever.

“In those days we had only private schools,” Mrs. Frazer said.  “If there were public schools I never heard of them.  The first school I went to was taught by Mr. Cross, who had canvassed the town and obtained perhaps twenty-five private pupils at a stated price for the tuition of each.  I do not know how much Mr. Cross charged, but when I was older I remember that a young woman teacher opened a school after getting twenty-five pupils at $25 each for the year’s tuition.  I shall never forget that Mr. Cross did not belie his name, however, or that Sam Clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him.”

She quoted it this way: 

  Cross by name and Cross by nature,
  Cross hopped out of an Irish potato.