My father was now in the full stress of his great work at Marlborough, and spent his summer holidays for the most part in Switzerland, but Christmas and Easter still often found us at Freshwater. In 1866 Tennyson's eldest son, Hallam, was sent to school at Marlborough. "I am not sending my son to Marlborough--I am sending him to Bradley," he said in reply to the Queen's question. On another occasion he said: "I am sending him to Marlborough because Bradley is a friend of mine, and Stanley tells me that Marlborough is the best school in England." There followed three visits to Marlborough during the four years longer that my father remained there. The second one, when Lady Tennyson came with her husband, was brought about by the severe illness of the cherished son, and lasted seven weeks. At first the anxiety about the boy was too great to admit of pleasure either to them or to my parents, to whom--especially to my mother--Hallam was almost as a son of their own. But later, and during the Poet's other visits, there were walks and drives in Savernake forest, beautiful at all seasons of the year, and over the windy spaces of the gray silent downland, where "the chronicles of wasted Time" are written in worn and mysterious hieroglyphs of stone, and fosse, and hillock. During the first visit "The Victim" was written by him in the room called the green dressing-room, looking out on the clipped yews and tall lime-circle of Lady Hertford's old garden. In summer-time he had great pleasure in the peaceful beauty of Marlborough and its landscape, and also in the wealth of flowers with which my mother surrounded herself in her house and garden; for she was a great gardener before it became fashionable to be so. In the drawing-room at the Lodge, masters and their wives--then all young--and Sixth Form boys gathered around the Poet. At that time he had for years been living a life apart from the crowd, and it must have been an effort to him to project himself into this young and wholly strange school society. But he did it gallantly and seemed happy among the young people. There were science evenings and poetry evenings. That is, there were evenings when masters interested in science exhibited the wonders of the microscope, and evenings when Tennyson read aloud his own poetry or Hood's comic verses. I remember well being allowed to stay up to hear him read "Guinevere" to the Upper Sixth Form. He had a great deep voice like the booming of waves in a sea-cave, and although the situation in the poem was not one to appeal to a child, yet his reading of the farewell of Arthur to Guinevere affected me so much that I crawled into a corner and wept two pocket-handkerchiefs full of tears.