for their rank. The carpenter and the Crown Prince of Prussia alike must sit
as still as stones in the attitudes she chose, in the draperies she arranged, for as
long as she wished. She cared nothing for her own labours and failures and
exhaustion. "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me, and at
length the longing was satisfied," she wrote. Painters praised her art; writers
marvelled at the character her portraits revealed. She herself blazed up at
length into satisfaction with her own creations. "It is a sacred blessing which
has attended my photography," she wrote. "It gives pleasure to millions."
She lavished her photographs upon her friends and relations, hung them in
railway waiting-rooms, and offered them, it is said, to porters in default of
small change.
Old Mr. Cameron meanwhile retired more and more frequently to the
comparative privacy of his bedroom. He had no taste for society himself, but
endured it, as he endured all his wife's vagaries, with philosophy and affection.
"Julia is slicing up Ceylon," he would say, when she embarked on another
adventure or extravagance. Her hospitalities and the failure of the coffee crop
("Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that
the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flowers," she
said) had brought his affairs into a precarious state. But it was not business
anxieties alone that made Mr. Cameron wish to visit Ceylon. The old
philosopher became more and more obsessed with the desire to return to the
East. There was peace; there was warmth; there were the monkeys and the
elephants whom he had once lived among "as a friend and a brother." Sud-
denly, for the secret had been kept from their friends, the Camerons announced
that they were going to visit their sons in Ceylon. Their preparations were
made and friends went to say good-bye to them at Southampton. Two coffins
preceded them on board packed with glass and china, in case coffins should
be unprocurable in the East; the old philosopher with his bright fixed eyes and
his beard "dipt in moonlight" held in one hand his ivory staff and in the
other Lady Tennyson's parting gift of a pink rose; while Mrs. Cameron, "grave
and valiant," vociferated her final injunctions and controlled not only innumer-
able packages but a cow.
They reached Ceylon safely, and in her gratitude Mrs. Cameron raised a
subscription to present the Captain with a harmonium. Their house at Kalutara
was so surrounded by trees that rabbits and squirrels and minah birds passed
in and out while a beautiful tame stag kept guard at the open door. Marianne
North, the traveller, visited them there and found old Mr. Cameron in a state
of perfect happiness, reciting poetry, walking up and down the veran-
