Helen Keller and Mark Twain

From the American Foundation for the Blind's Helen Killer Kids Museum website:
Here's the description, descriptive indeed for the sight-impared user, and a bonus for the rest of us:

This faded photograph, from 1902, shows four people on a sunny front porch. Helen is seated on the far left, smiling, while Anne stands behind her, signing into her hand. To their right is Mark Twain, sitting with his hands folded in his lap, and Laurence Hutton, who is standing behind Twain and holding a cigar. Hutton was Literary Editor of Harper's magazine and a supporter of Helen's education.

And here is Thomas Edison's 1909 film of Mark Twain—I think the only one there is—of the author doing a silly walk and playing cards with his daughters:

The recollection that sent me off gleefully discovering the above, was a quotation in an article of a few years back, perhaps the New York Review of Books, in which Keller described in detail the timbre of Twain's voice, felt by touching his throat as he talked. I couldn't track the article, or the original down, but this will do well in its place:

The Story of My Life, chapter XXIII:

I read from Mark Twain's lips one or two of his good stories. He has his own way of thinking, saying and doing everything. I feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake. Even while he utters his cynical wisdom in an indescribably droll voice, he makes you feel that his heart is a tender Iliad of human sympathy.

I find it thrilling how, 97 years after Twain's death, probably the best, the closest description we have of his voice was from someone who couldn't, in the usual sense, hear—but whose gift, to herself and to the world, was in learning, largely through metaphorical skill, to transcend the gaps and silences that separated her from his world, and him from ours. "I could feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake". Wonderful.