There was no reply.
"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward! Come and be vaccinated!"
She won.
When Garibaldi visited Tennyson, he planted a tree in the Farringford grounds. And Mrs. Cameron planted herself before him, and begged him to come and be photographed. Rather eccentric, as my old-timer had tried to convey, she had that morning hastened to Farringford without hat, or gloves, and with her sleeves rolled up, just as she came from her "dark room", and her hands were stained with photographic chemicals. Garibaldi seems to have taken her for a beggar and was turning away, when she knelt before him and implored him to let her photograph him.
Again she won. She always won in such contests.
Mrs. Cameron's day was before the days of dry plates and films. The accumulation of negatives that she left when, with her husband, she returned to Ceylon, where they had formerly lived for many years, passed into the possession of a son. I do not know what has been their subsequent fate; but if uninjured they would be very interesting now, and a collection of prints from them would have a value all its own. She made a number, I daresay many photographs of Tennyson and the members of his family; and when Longfellow came to Farringford, the good lady triumphantly proclaimed him a captive.
She was a kind-hearted, good-natured soul, but when she wanted to carry a point she could be as imperious and decisive as any one that ever lived in the Isle. The neighbourhood children she would persuade by "sweeties", or, failing these, by main force, to "come and be photographed" in this character or that, and there were maid servants with classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who posed for her as characters in plays and poems, in costumes which she would improvise. Mrs. Cameron was a generous, interesting, impulsive woman. Much of Freshwater legend gathers about her, and her camera, and her diligence in amateur theatricals.
In my island study there hung for many years the two best photographs of Tennyson that I ever saw. They were taken by Mrs. Cameron. The first was, I believe, taken about 1870, or '72. It represents the poet seated, and holding with both hands a book half opened in his lap. He wears a black morning coat, closely buttoned, cut in the fashion of the time. Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too, are in the mode, and over the coat a monocle hangs. It is quite out of the style of other Tennyson portraits with which I am reasonably familiar, but on that account it has a special interest of its own. The second photograph, to which I have alluded, is not only thoroughly characteristic but has achieved some fame as "The Dirty Monk", and is thus autographed by its original:
"I prefer 'The Dirty Monk'
to the others of me.
A. Tennyson.
Except one by Mayall."
When I returned to Freshwater for three or four months in 1913, after several years' absence, I looked, as usual, for this precious pair. But they had gone, and no one could tell, or would tell, when or where. Some souvenir hunter must have loved them too well.