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[4] === “Mark Twain’s Childhood Sweetheart Recalls Their Romance” (1918) [Laura Frazier] “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 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.1 Anna Laura Hawkins Frazier (1837–1938), whose name is sometimes spelled “Frazer” like it is in the following piece, was the model for the character of Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). She reminisced about their childhood in Hannibal some seventy-five years after Sam and Laura attended Samuel Cross’s frame schoolhouse on the square and Elizabeth Horr (d. 1873) “taught the children in a small log house at the southern end of Main street” (Neider 31–32). [5] “We were boy and girl sweethearts, Sam Clemens and I,” Mrs. Frazer said with a gentle little laugh. 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. . . . “I must have been six or seven 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 farther 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 hooky 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...

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