Alum Bay, near Farringford, is now greatly changed. A big hotel stands up dwarfing its cliffs, from which the famous layers of various-coloured sand are being continually scooped into bottles, and on many a cottage mantelpiece in the island there is a glass bottle showing a picture of a lighthouse, or something else curiously wrought in Alum Bay sand. The jagged white Needles still tip the westward point of its crescent, still seeming to salute with greeting or farewell the majestic procession of great ocean-going ships, and to smile on the frolic wings of yachts, that all the summer long flirt and dance over the blue waters of the Solent, like a flight of white butterflies. Formerly the rough track to the Bay led over a lonely bit of common called the Warren, where furze grew, and short brown-tasselled rushes marked the course of a hardly visible stream. The Warren Farm lies on the landward edge of the Warren, and there on a sunny 6th of August 1855, a third birthday was being solemnized with tea and a tent. It was a blue tent on the top of a haystack, and under it between her baby boy and girl, sat a blue-eyed mother, with the bloom of youth and the freshness of the sea on her beauty. The mother and the two children, lovely, too, with more than the usual loveliness of childhood, were keeping their tiny festival with a gay simplicity, and I do not doubt that on that as on other birthdays, Edith, the birthday queen, was wearing on her golden curls a garland of rosebuds and mignonette. The wheels of a carriage were heard driving up to the farm gate, and in a minute a tall dark man, like a Spanish señor in his long cloak and sombrero, appeared under the haystack. The young woman noted the tall figure, the hat and cloak, the long, dark, clear-cut face, with the beardless and finely modelled mouth and chin, the splendid eyes under the high forehead, and the deep furrows running from nose to chin. She perceived at once it was Alfred Tennyson, whose poems she knew and loved so well. Meantime the Poet, sensitive as all artists must be to human loveliness, looked surely with delight on the pretty picture, the haystack and the blue tent, the young mother and her babes: a picture which was to form as it were a gracious frontispiece to a whole volume of friendship. He bade her "throw the little maid into his arms," caught the child and asked her how old she was. "Three to-day," answered little Edith proudly. "Then you and I," said he, "have the same birthday."