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ticket was bought for the Isle of Wight. She was going to Farringford to sup with the Poet Laureate, greatest of living poets. It was some five years earlier that Tennyson had written his 'In Memoriam,' had become Poet Laureate, and had, after seventeen years of tepid courtship, married the wistful lady of his choice. They had moved but recently to Farringford, deep in its damp hollow among cedars and chestnuts on the Isle of Wight. There, if anywhere, might the Bard find the solitude so necessary to his genius. But even here autograph collectors and celebrity hunters had sought him out. Countrymen of Lanice, even from Boston, so far forgot their breeding as to climb trees to stare upon him as he played battledore and shuttlecock with his wife. Expectant tourists dotted the downs that he had loved because of their solitude, and turned their opera glasses upon the great, dusty, slouching frame of the Poet.

Lanice came as an invited guest. There had been some correspondence between the Laureate and Clapyard. Then, almost as terrifying as a summons from the Angel of Death, came a little thin wisp of a letter from Mrs. Tennyson. Now a cab waited for her in his great name. A brief jouncy ride shook out of her head all the appropriate platitudes that she had been months in culling. Next Freshwater Bay with cliffs