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By MARY POLETTI

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

HANNIBAL, Mo. -- A clock said to have belonged to the real-life Becky Thatcher returned to its home in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum Tuesday after three months' restoration work.

However, museum officials say the work answered no questions about the 18th-century clock's mysterious origins.

Employees of the Ralls County Clock Co. moved the seven-foot-tall grandfather clock from their Main Street shop back to the museum Tuesday morning, carrying it across the street in pieces and reassembling it in its longtime home outside the museum's second-floor auditorium.

The reassembly took roughly half an hour, but it made a striking diversion for museum staff.

Executive Director Cindy Lovell, walking out of her office near the clock to take her lunch break, stopped in her tracks and said: "Wow."

Curator Henry Sweets said he had visited the clock at the shop to see how work was progressing and said it had operated well even in the repair shop.

As clock shop employees Don Morton Jr. and Matt Walden reinstalled the clock's movement and wound the clock, it began to tick and chime again without incident, as it would have in Twain's time.

"I'm looking forward to having it chiming away again," Sweets said.

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