[526] _L. of G._, 346. [527] Calamus, 98. CHAPTER XV ILLNESS At the opening of 1873 Whitman had been just ten years in Washington, and was in the fifty-fourth of his age. Recent letters to his friends had told of more frequent spells of partially disabling sickness and lassitude.[528] On the evening of Thursday, January 23rd, he sat late over the fire in the Library of the Treasury Building, reading Lord Lytton's _What will he do with it?_[529] As he left, the guard at the door remarked him looking ill. His room was close by, just across the street; and he went to bed as usual. Between three and four in the morning, he awoke to find that he could move neither arm nor leg on the left side. Presently he fell asleep again; and later, as he could not rise, lay on quietly, till some friends coming in raised the alarm and fetched a doctor. After some six or seven years of preliminary symptoms,[530] Walt had now had a slight stroke of paralysis. His first thought was of his mother, to whom he wrote as soon as he was able, reassuring her; for the newspapers had exaggerated his condition. Once before, he reminds her with grim humour, they had killed him off; but he is on the road to recovery; in a few days he will be back at his desk on the other side of the street. Pete Doyle, Charles Eldridge and John Burroughs came in to nurse and companion him: Mrs. Ashton would have carried him to her house; Mrs. O'Connor, who did not share in the estrangement of her husband, was often at his bedside. And at the bed-foot, his mother's picture was always before him. He had scarcely begun to move about a little in his room before a letter from St. Louis told of the death of Martha, Jefferson Whitman's wife, to whom the whole family was much attached, and Walt especially. The blow fell heavily on him. On the last day of March,[531] he crossed the street again to his work; and by the end of April he was having regular electrical treatment, and working for a couple of hours daily, with an occasional lapse. His leg was very clumsy, and he complained of frequent sensations of distress and weakness in his head, but he seemed to be progressing as well as was possible. Early in May, however, the old mother in Camden fell ill. Walt was very anxious about her;[532] at her age she could hardly recover from a serious illness, and his letters to her are pathetically full of loving solicitude. She grew rapidly worse, and although he was still but feeble, he could not remain away from her. On the 20th he hurried home, and on the 23rd, while he was with her, she died.[533] The shock to Walt was terrible; and when, dreading the heat, he attempted to reach the coast, he had a serious relapse at the outset, and was brought back to Colonel Whitman's, to the melancholy little house. And here he too, so it would seem, was to end his life. * * * * *