comfortable in his new home now, he did not discontinue his accustomed morning visits, and as he persisted in his old delinquencies he completely upset the routine of Mrs. Davis's daily life and work.

Things ran on in this way until one morning late in February, while he was sipping his coffee, he told her he had a proposition to make. He said: "I have a house while you pay rent; you have furniture while my rooms are bare; I propose that you come and live with me, bringing your furniture for the use of both." A suggestion of this kind was so unlooked for that she refused to give it a moment's consideration. He said no more at the time, but a few days later again broached the subject. And this he continued to do daily until Mrs. Davis, who remained firm for awhile, at last began to waver.

The young orphan girl strongly opposed such a step, but Mr. Whitman's persistence prevailed, for Mrs. Davis at last gave a reluctant consent. The advantage was all on the poet's side, as he must have seen, but recent events had raised his hopes and he made promises of adequate and more than adequate returns for all that had been done or might be done for him.

As his money was "only in sight," to use his own words, the expenses of moving were paid by Mrs. Davis; as he was disabled, the work and worry were hers as well; but finally all was accomplished, her goods were transferred to his house and put in their new places, and the seven years of their domestic life together commenced. In this way did the "good gray poet" retire with his "single attendant" to the little frame cottage, No. 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey.

III

THE MICKLE STREET HOUSE

"The tide turned when he entered the Mickle Street house."—Thomas Donaldson.

"Whitman had great satisfaction in the managing skill of his housekeeper."—Sidney Morse.

ADDED to "managing skill," Mrs. Davis had patience, perseverance, determination, courage and health; furthermore—having accompanied the Fritzinger family upon a number of ocean trips, undertaken in the hope of benefiting Mrs. Fritzinger—she had shipboard experience which enabled her to make available every inch of space in a house smaller than the one she had left. It was an unpretentious brown frame structure, sadly out of repair, and decidedly the poorest tenement in the block. On the right was a brick house whose strong walls seemed to be holding it up, while on the left was an alley—scarcely more than a gutter—closed from the street by a wooden door.

This narrow passage, filled with ice and snow in the winter, often damp and slippery even in warm weather, was unfit for general use; and as the house was not properly drained, the cellar through its one little window was often flooded from dripping eaves.

Three wooden steps without a banister led from the sidewalk to the front door, which had to be closed to allow those who entered to ascend the stairs. This narrow staircase, an equally narrow hall and two connecting rooms called "the parlors" comprised the first floor of the main building. Between the parlors were folding doors, and each room had an exit into the hall. There were two windows in the front parlor and a single one in the back. Between and under the front windows was an entrance to the cellar, with old-fashioned slanting doors.

The rear and smaller portion of the house was divided into but two apartments, the kitchen below and a sleeping room above. At the back of the kitchen was a small shed, and quite a large yard. Some people believed that this yard, with its pear tree and grape vine, had been the main attraction of the place for Mr. Whitman.

On ascending the staircase, a small landing and the back sleeping room were reached; then, turning about, came more stairs, with a larger landing, part of which had been made into a clothespress. Apart from this landing and a little den, sometimes known as "the anteroom," the upper portion of the main building had only one room. But the two doors in it, and a deep rugged scar across the low ceiling, testified to its having formerly been divided by a partition. As one of the doors was permanently fastened, the only access was through the den, anteroom, or "adjoining apartment," as it was also occasionally called.

In the larger room was a fireplace with a mantel shelf above. There were two windows corresponding with the windows below, while the smaller room or den, reduced to one-half its proper width by some pine shelves and an outjutting chimney, had like the room below but one. The outlook from this window, into which the sun made but a few annual peeps, was the brick wall on one side, the back roof on the other, and a glimpse of the sky.

The situation of the house was anything but inviting, and the locality was one that few would choose to live in. It was near both depot and ferry, and as the tracks were but a block away, or scarcely that, being laid in what would have been the centre of the next street, there was an uninterrupted racket day and night. The noise of the passenger and excursion trains—for the excursions to the coast went by way of Camden—was only a minor circumstance compared with that of the freight trains as they thundered by, or passed and re-passed in making up.

Close at hand was a church with a sharp-toned bell, and a "choir of most nerve-unsettling singers" (Thomas Donaldson); and as if this were not enough, there was at times a most disagreeable odor from a guano factory on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware.

Such was the house to which Mary Davis had now come, and where through the strange, busy days of the next seven years she was destined to be Walt Whitman's indispensable "housekeeper, nurse and friend"—or, from the outsider's point of view, his "single attendant."

The spring of 1885 was far advanced before things were fairly in running order, for from the first there had been no intermission in the poet's erratic mode of living, and Mrs. Davis had been obliged to devote much time to his personal wants. Somehow he had a way of demanding attention which she found it impossible to resist.

Truly she had been hampered on all sides, this faithful Martha-Mary; so many things to be seen to, so many things to handle and rehandle and change about before an established place for them could be found; the strenuous cleaning, for the former tenants had left the place extremely dirty; and the pondering over repairs, and deciding which were absolutely essential and unpostponable, and which could be put off for a little while longer.

She first carpeted, furnished and settled the parlors, intending the back one as the sleeping room for her young charge, until her marriage in the fall, when it could be used as a spare room. But Mr. Whitman had different intentions, for he at once appropriated both rooms, and would not allow the doors separating them to be closed.

One of the front windows became his favorite sitting place, and here he wrote, read his papers and sat while entertaining his friends. He was delighted with these rooms, and in them he enjoyed himself to his heart's content: first in getting things into disorder at once, and then in keeping them so.

The back room, which became kitchen, dining room and sitting room combined, was so compactly filled that many people remarked its close resemblance to the cabin of a ship, in the way of convenience as compared with space. It was