‘In India, in the absence of the Governor-General’s wife, she has been at the head of the European Society, for Mr. Cameron was a very high official, succeeding Lord Macaulay as legal member of Council. ‘Does Alice,’ he writes to a friend, ‘ever tell you, or do I, how we go on with Mrs. Cameron, how she keeps showering on us “her barbaric pearls and gold,” Indian shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, &c., and how she writes us letters six sheets long all about ourselves.... It was indeed impossible that we should not grow fond of her, and not less so for the many, whom her genial ardent and generous nature has captivated since.’ It is very difficult to describe Mrs. Cameron. She played the game of life with such vivid courage and disregard for ordinary rules, she entered into other people’s interests with such warmhearted sympathy and determined devotion, that, though her subjects may have occasionally rebelled, they generally ended by gratefully succumbing to her rule, laughing and protesting all the time. Sir Henry quotes her saying to someone with whom she had disagreed: ‘before the year is out you will love me as a sister,’ and he adds that she proved the truth of this prophecy. She must have been a trying sister at times, especially when her relations and adopted relations were ill. She longed to cure them on the spot; she would fly in an agony from one great doctor to another, demanding advice and insisting on instant prescription and alleviation. ‘Culpable carelessness, profound ignorance,’ were the least of her criticisms of family physicians whom she had not sent in herself. She would eloquently describe the anxious hours she spent in waiting-rooms, obtaining opinions from great authorities who had not even seen the patient. Sir Henry’s stepmother (Mrs. Cameron had barely known her) says: I think I might have found good Mrs. Cameron’s loving letter difficult to answer, and though I have a sort of scruple about refusing kindness and charitable love, yet I cannot help being glad you saved me....’ II. The real neighbours in life do not depend on vicinity only, they have a way of continuing to be neighbours quite irrespective of their different addresses. The Tennysons had ever a very faithful following of old friends wherever they happened to be, none more faithful than Julia Cameron. As I have said the first letter quoted from Twickenham was followed by a life-long correspondence. Mrs. Tennyson had hurt her wrist in early youth and writing was often difficult to her; though until her son grew up almost the whole of her husband’s correspondence depended upon her. Mrs. Cameron on the contrary loved her pen. She wrote a large and flowing hand. She allowed herself more space in life and on paper than is usually accorded to other people. I remember her offering to write for my father. ‘Nobody writes as well as I do’ she said.