“The door was opened by Clara Clemens, Mr. Clemens’s daughter,” Mrs. Frazer said, “and she threw her arms about me and cried: 

    ’I know you, for I’ve seen your picture, and father has told me
    about you.  You are Becky Thatcher, and I’m happy to see you.’

“And that,” Mrs. Frazer said, “was the first time I really knew I was the original of the character, although I had suspected it for thirty years.  Clara Clemens, you know, even then was a famous contralto, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose wife she is now, was ‘waiting’ on her at the time.

“It was a wonderful visit,” she went on.  “Mr. Clemens took me over Stormfield.  It must have been a tract of three hundred acres.  We went through the fields, which were not fields at all, since they were not cultivated, and across a rustic bridge over a little rushing brook which boiled and bubbled among the rocks in the bed of a great ravine, and we sat down under a rustic arbor and talked of the old days in Hannibal when he was a little boy and I a little girl, before he went out into the world to win fame and before I lived my own happy married life.  Mr. Clemens had that rare faculty of loyalty to his friends which made the lapse of fifty years merely an interim.  It was as if the half century had rolled away and we were there looking on the boy and girl we had been.

“Mr. Clemens had won worldwide fame; he had been a welcome guest in the palaces of Old World rulers and lionized in the great cities of his own country.  He had been made a Doctor of Literature by the University of Oxford, the highest honor of the greatest university in the world, and yet there at Stormfield to me he seemed to be Sam Clemens of old Hannibal, rather than the foremost man in the American world of letters.

“That, I believe, is my most treasured memory of Sam Clemens,” Mrs. Frazer ended.  “I love to think of him as the curly-headed, rollicking, clean minded little boy I played with as a child, but I like better still to think of him as he was in his last days, when all that fame and fortune had showered on him did not, even momentarily, make him waver in his loyalty to the friends of his youth.”

In Hannibal stands the quaint little 2-story house flush with the sidewalk which Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s father built in 1844, after he had moved to the old river town from Florida, Mo., where the great story teller was born.  Restored, it houses many reminders of the author and is maintained as a memorial to Mark Twain.  There, November 30, the eighty-second anniversary of the birth of Clemens, the people of Hannibal and persons from many cities widely scattered over America will go to pay tribute to his memory.

And there they will see Becky Thatcher in the flesh, silkengowned, gray-haired and grown old, but Becky Thatcher just the same, seated in a chair which once was Mark Twain’s and pouring tea at a table on which the author once wrote.  And if the aroma of the cup she hands out to each visitor doesn’t waft before his mind a vision of a curly-headed boy and a little girl with golden long-tails at play on the wharf of old Hannibal while the ancient packets ply up and down the rolling blue Mississippi, there is nothing whatever in the white magic of association.