But he found time always—and until the end—to remember and to write to his old and dear friends. One more extract (the last in this book) from a letter from Venice, to an invalid friend in Manchester in 1880:—
"I am sorry to hear that you are so lame," he says. "I wish you had been with us in Venice—the going to and fro in gondolas would have suited you well. Easy, smooth, and soul-subduing—especially by moonlight and when the ear is filled with the rich notes of a very uncommon gondolier's voice and the twanging of a sentimental traveller's lute.
"On the 18th of March we were married at a small church in Kent—my best man drove me in a dog-cart. I sold him my mare on the way, and she came to sad grief with him!"
Sketch of "Wybournes," Kemsing, near Sevenoaks.
The letters after this date refer to a period in Caldecott's art which must be considered at a future time. Only two remembrances of his later years shall be recorded now; one of him at Kemsing, seated in his old-fashioned garden on a fine summer's afternoon (after hard work from nine till two) surrounded by his friends and four-footed playmates—a garden where the birds, and even the flowers, lived unrestrained.
"Where woodbines wander, and the wallflower pushes
Its way alone;
And where, in wafts of fragrance, sweetbriar-bushes
Make themselves known.
With banks of violets for southern breezes
To seek and find,
And trellis'd jessamine that trembles in
The summer wind.
Where clove-carnations overgrow the places
Where they were set,
And, mist-like, in the intervening spaces
Creeps mignonette."
The other and a later remembrance of Caldecott is at a gathering of friends in Victoria Street, Westminster, in January, 1885, when—to a good old English tune—the "lasses and lads," out of his Picture Book, danced before him, and the fiddler, in the costume of the time, "played it wrong."