The daughter of a prosperous Elmira, New York, lumber merchant, Clara Spaulding was described by Clemens as “my wife’s playmate and schoolmate from the earliest times, and she was about my wife’s age, or two or three years younger—mentally, morally, spiritually, and in all ways, a superior and lovable personality.” Clara accompanied the Clemens family to Europe twice: first in 1873, and again on the 1878–79 trip that became the basis for A Tramp Abroad (1880). Spaulding, who married lawyer John Barry Stanchfield (1855–1921) in 1886, became Clemens’s trusted friend as well as Livy’s, and was called “Aunt Clara” by their children.