I walked over one afternoon and sent in my card. Mr. Hallam Tennyson, then a very handsome young man of winsome manner, came out and said that his father was taking his usual _siesta_, but begged me to remain, kindly adding, "Because I know, Mr. Leland, he would be very sorry to have missed you." After a little time, however, Tennyson himself appeared, and took me up to his den or studio, where I was asked to take a pipe, which I did with great good-will, and blew a cloud, enjoying it greatly, because I felt with my host, as with Bulwer, that we had quickly crossed acquaintanceship into the more familiar realm where one can talk about whatever you please with the certainty of being understood and getting a sympathetic answer. There are lifelong friends with whom one never really gets to this, and there are acquaintances of an hour at _table- d'hotes_, who "come like shadows, so depart," who talk with a touch to our hearts. Bulwer and Tennyson were such to me, and _apre miro zi_, as the gypsies say--on my life-soul!--if I had talked with them, as I did, without knowing who they were, I should have recalled them with quite as much interest as I now do, and see them again in dreams. And here I may add, that the common-place saying that literary men are rarely good talkers, and generally disappointing, is not at all confirmed by my experiences. After burning our tobacco, in Indian fashion, to better acquaintance (I forgot to say that the poet had two dozen clay pipes ranged in a small wooden rack), we went forth for a seven miles' walk on the Downs. And at last, from the summit of one, I pointed down to a small field below, and said-- But first I must specify that the day before I had gone with a young lady of fourteen summers named Bee or Beatrice Fredericson, both of us bearing baskets, to pick blackberries for tea, and coming to a small field which was completely surrounded by a hedge, we saw therein illimitable blackberries glittering in the setting sunlight, and longed to enter. Finding a gap which had been filled by a dead thorn-bush, I removed the latter, and, going in, we soon picked a quart of the fruit. But on leaving we were met by the farmer, who made a to-do, charging us with trespassing. To which I replied, "Well, what is to pay?" He asked for two shillings, but was pacified with one; and so we departed. Therefore I said to Tennyson, "I went into that field yesterday to pick your blackberries, and your farmer caught us and made me pay a shilling for trespassing." And he gravely replied, though evidently delighted--"Served you right! What business had you to come over my hedge into my field to steal my blackberries?" "_Mea culpa_," I answered, "_mea maxima culpa_."