‘He wore for my sake his very brightest looks and you know there is no cheer like his. His spirits dance with intellectual freshness and buoyancy, all his talk is mirth and wide pleasantry and his voice is full of song.
‘He has to travel in districts, sleeping in the open and my imagination represents the invasion of beasts and reptiles. He walks through long grass where I fear snakes for his beloved feet. He says alligators on the river-side are the only beasts he sees, alligators ten or twelve feet long.’ (Here many pages follow partly concerning Ceylon and the people who then lived there, partly concerning Freshwater and its politics.)—‘And how is your dear Alfred, dearest of all and greatest ever in your heart beyond all; above all, I hope not bothered about anything.’ ‘Worries, for him, are as if these vast sublime mountains, instead of standing steady as they do, rearing their eternal heads to the sky, were to be swayed by the perishable chances of the little coffee estates at their feet.
‘What is time in the eyes of Him to whom a thousand years are but as yesterday and who pities us when we vex our immortal souls with fears of more or less gold, and good crops, one year or another?
‘Think of us in a little hut with only mud walls, four thousand four hundred feet above the level of the sea.’
It was in her youngest son’s bungalow on the Glencairn estate that Mrs. Cameron died, early in 1879, only a short time after her second return to Ceylon. She had been warned not to return, but she longed to be near ‘her boys.’ The illness only lasted ten days. When she lay dying, her bed faced the wide-open window; it was a glorious evening and some big stars were shining. She looked out and just said ‘Beautiful’ and died, her last word, a fitting end to her reverent soul on earth. Her body was taken in a low open cart, drawn by two great white bullocks, and all covered with white cloth, over two ridges of mountains, and buried in the little churchyard at the bottom of the valley, between Galle and Colombo, where Hardinge was living. After this Hardinge took his father and his mother’s maid, the faithful Ellen Ottingnon, ‘old E,’ to live with him there. It was in May of the following year that Mr. Cameron died, and he too was carried over the mountains and buried in the same churchyard.
‘I can’t describe to you the beauty of that valley entered by a narrow pass,’ writes Mrs. Bowden Smith who sent this record. ‘High mountains surround it and the rolling green grass lands and a great river runs all along it. The little church stands on a knoll not far above the river, which flows into a lower river, also a dream of beauty. They could not have found a more beautiful resting-place.’
Lady Tennyson survived her friend seventeen years:
‘Such wert thou, half a Saint and half a Queen,
Close in thy poet’s mighty soul enshrined,
Lady of Farringford,’