The sunshine of a morning at Farringford in early summer when we came up the long middle walk, bordered on either side with lilac-flowered aubretia, led up to the open summer-house where Tennyson, with two or three friends, sat in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the lovely lines of lilac. We turned towards the house after a time, going under the budding trees of the grove. There he pointed out some young bushes of Alexandrian laurel--the same, he told us, whose small narrow leaves were used to make the crown for victors in the Olympian games.... Then--can I ever forget?--that delightful evening at Aldworth, when, after dinner, he invited me to his room upstairs. There he smoked his pipe in his high-backed, cane arm-chair, while I sat near. On a little table by the fire were arranged several more of these well-smoked Dublin pipes. Such a large, comfortable "smoke-room"!--with books about everywhere, on tables and chairs. Then he read to me aloud from "Locksley Hall." I think he read all the poem from the beginning to the end; and as Tennyson read on--one seemed almost to feel the pungent, salt sea-breeze blowing from over desolate seas--almost saw visions of the dreary sands lengthening far away. I remember I ventured to ask why the stanza which follows after that line, "And all the wonder that should be," was afterwards omitted: In the hall there hangs a picture--Amy's arms about my neck, Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck. In my life there was a picture--she that clasp'd my neck is flown, I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone. I began saying the lines, but he knew them quite well and repeated them. I can't think how it is, the answer he returned about this is now, alas! forgot.... Such troublous years have come and gone since that happy Long-Ago. (The omitted stanza would have gone, too, had it not been written down for me by a long-lost friend, Sir Robert Morier.) So the reading aloud went on, with talk between (and clouds of smoke!), until, I think, past eleven o'clock, when you opened the door, and that--for me--rare dream of poetry and charm abruptly broke. I saw Tennyson, for the last time, as I followed down the wooded path at Aldworth, on his way to the garden door opening on the heath, his fine, big, Russian hound pacing closely after.