During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father's great and frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which knitted that "fair companionship" and made of it "such a friendship as had mastered time," and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have "crossed the bar." The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: "It is a besom of destruction sweeping the sky." Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and, opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, "Am I in Heaven?" The writing and publication of "Maud" in 1855 was largely due to my father. Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he came upon the exquisite lyric "O that 'twere possible," and said, "Why do you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?" Tennyson told him that the poem had appeared years before in the _Tribute_, an ephemeral publication, but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he had persuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put "Maud" into his hand. It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson gave my father the manuscript of "In Memoriam."[79] He had often asked him to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure which it gave my father during the whole of his life. Tennyson's visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee, and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father saying to one of my sisters: "Never forget that the greatest of poets has kissed you and made you drink from his glass."