of Prussia alike must sit as still as stones in the attitudes she chose, in the draperies she arranged,
for as long as she wished. She cared nothing for her own labours and failures and exhaustion. "I
longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me, and at length the longing was satisfied,"
she wrote. Painters praised her art; writers marvelled at the character her portraits revealed.
She herself blazed up at length into satisfaction with her own creations. "It is a sacred blessing
which has attended my photography," she wrote. "It gives pleasure to millions." She lavished her
photographs upon her friends and relations, hung them in railway waiting-rooms, and offered
them, it is said, to porters in default of small change.

Old Mr. Cameron meanwhile retired more and more frequently to the comparative privacy of 
his bedroom. He had no taste for society himself, but endured it, as he endured all his wife's 
vagaries, with philosophy and affection. "Julia is slicing up Ceylon," he would say, when she 
embarked on another adventure or extravagance. Her hospitalities and the failure of the coffee 
crop ("Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first 
grandchild should be more beautiful than any flowers," she said) had brought his affairs into a 
precarious state. But it was not business anxieties alone that made Mr. Cameron wish to visit 
Ceylon. The old philosopher became more and more obsessed with the desire to return to the 
East. There was peace; there was warmth; there were the monkeys and the elephants whom he 
had once lived among "as a friend and a brother." Suddenly, for the secret had been kept from 
their friends, the Camerons announced that they were going to visit their sons in Ceylon. Their 
preparations were made and friends went to say good-bye to them at Southampton. Two coffins 
preceded them on board packed with glass and china, in case coffins should be unprocurable in 
the East; the old philosopher with his bright fixed eyes and his beard "dipt in moonlight" held 
in one hand his ivory staff and in the other Lady Tennyson's parting gift of a pink rose; while 
Mrs. Cameron, "grave and valiant," vociferated her final injunctions and controlled not only 
innumerable packages but a cow.

They reached Ceylon safely, and in her gratitude Mrs. Cameron raised a subscription to present 
the Captain with a harmonium. Their house at Kalutara was so surrounded by trees that rabbits 
and squirrels and minah birds passed in and out while a beautiful tame stag kept guard at the open 
door. Marianne North, the traveller, visited them there and found old Mr. Cameron in a state of 
perfect happiness, reciting poetry, walking up and down the verandah, with his long white hair