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Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 91, 2 August 1895, Page 3

A good story about Tennyson is told by Mr Smalley, in his Studies of Men. , A yachting trip was given some years ago by Sir Donald Currie to distinguished guests in one of the big steamship that his company runs to the Cape. There was on board a young English girl of brilliant beauty and sympathetic charm, and to her the pet attached himself. When he read bis poems to the company he would have her by his side and hold her hand, which, in the fervour of recitation, he would often press The ship put in at Copenhagen, and the Princess of Wales and the Empress of Russia, then on a visit to her old home, came on board. There was luncheon, and after luncheon Tennyson was elected to read, and did, sitting between the Empress on one side and the English girl on the other. When it was , over and they had gone up on deck, he asked the girl whether she thought the Empress liked it. ‘Well,’ answered she, ‘ Her Majesty mrst have thought it a little unusual.* ‘ What do you moan ?’ ‘ I mean that I don’t think the Empress is in the habit «>f having her hands squeezed in public even by poets.’ ’’ The poet afterwards made his humble apologies for bis error, but the Empress only laughed. His demonstrativeness had In nowise warred I fcer enjoyment of his reading,