Part 45 (1/2)

”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 alith us Usually reat friends, were along to see that we didn't get lost areat stalag 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 theht 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 kno ed, but when I was older I reetting twenty-five pupils at 25 each for the year's tuition I shall never forget that Mr

Cross did not belie his naerel about him”

She quoted it this way:

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

”The schoolhouse was a 2-story fraallery across the entire front,” she resuether in that school Saht by Mrs Horr It was then he used to write notes toapples to school and put them on my desk

And once, as a punishirls and occupied a vacant seat by me He didn't seem to h, ”so I don't knohether it was effective as a punishe then, but ent toto Jerusalee's Son' and 'Green Grow the Rushes--O'

”Judge Clemens, Sam's father, died and left the fa ended there He began work in the printing office to help out, and when he was 17 or 18 he left Hannibal to go to work in St Louis He never returned to live, but he visited here often in the years that followed”

Mrs Frazer's own story for physician, Doctor Frazer of Madisonville, which was a little inland village in Ralls County, adjoining, came often to Hannibal and courted pretty Laura Hawkins When she was 20 they were married and went to live in the new house Doctor Frazer had built for his bride at Madisonville There they reared two sons until they required better school facilities, when they went to Rensselaer, also in Ralls County, but nearer Hannibal They lived in Rensselaer until Doctor Frazer's death, when the er son e led to Mrs Frazer's return to Hannibal twenty-two years ago She was offered the position of matron at the Hoed it The boys and girls who have gone out from it in nearly every case have becouidance at the critical period of their life, for the girls remain in the home until they are 14 and the boys until they are 12 The old mansion which houses the score orfor a new and ift from a wealthy citizen to the private charity which has conducted the institution so long without aid froiven to Mrs Frazer and Mark Twain to renew their youthful friendshi+p after a lapse of half a century In 1908 Mrs Frazer elow Paine at Redding, Conn Mr Paine had visited Hannibal two years before in a search for raphy of Mark Twain and had made Mrs

Frazer's acquaintance then He reat humorist and Mark Twain prouest also at Stor estate So it came about that the one-ti the knocker at the beautiful country home of Mark Twain in the Connecticut hills

”The door was opened by Clara Clehter,” 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 tih I had suspected it for thirty years Clara Clemens, you know, even then was a famous contralto, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose wife she is noaiting' on her at the time

”It was a wonderful visit,” she went on ”Mr Clemens took me over Stormfield It h the fields, which were not fields at all, since they were not cultivated, and across a rustic bridge over a little rushi+ng brook which boiled and bubbled areat 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 ere there looking on the boy and girl we had been

”Mr Cleuest 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 hi, 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 sidehich Sahorne Clemens's father built in 1844, after he had reat story teller was born Restored, it houses many reminders of the author and is maintained as a hty-second anniversary of the birth of Clemens, the people of Hannibal and persons froo to pay tribute to his memory