Mr. Carpenter saw him at Stevens Street and Timber Creek, and again under Mrs. Gilchrist's hospitable roof. They sat out together in the pleasant Philadelphia fashion through the warm June evenings upon the porch steps; and Walt would talk in his deliberate way of Japan and China, or of the Eastern literatures. He liked to join hands while he talked, communicating more, perhaps, of himself, and understanding his companion better, by touch than by words. His mere presence was sufficient to redeem the commonplace. His visitor had also an opportunity of noting the efficiency of Whitman's defences against the globe-trotting interview-hunting type of American woman. His silence became aggressive, and her words rebounded from it; he had disappeared into his rock-faced solitude where nothing could reach him. And a very few moments of this treatment sufficed, even for the brazen-armoured amazon. * * * * * During Mr. Carpenter's visit, Mrs. George Whitman, whom Dr. Bucke has described as an attractive, sweet woman, was out of health, and her brother-in-law made a daily excursion down town and across the ferry to see her, and to transact his own affairs. In the heat of the following July she first opened the door to Dr. Bucke.[585] He, too, had long been a student of _Leaves of Grass_, a student at first against his own judgment, and with little result beyond an annoying bewilderment to his sense of fitness, and of exasperation to his intelligence. But from the first, he felt a singular interior compulsion to read the book, which he could not at all understand. Its lack of all definite statement was the head and front of its offending to a keen scientific mind. But now after many years, he had come to recognise the extraordinary power of suggestion which was embodied in every page. Dr. R. Maurice Bucke's personality was strongly marked and striking; he had as much determination as had Whitman himself, and his whole face is full of resolute purpose. Born in Norfolk, in 1837, but immediately transplanted to Canada, he was thoroughly educated by his father, who was a man of considerable scholarship and a minister in the Church of England. In 1857, he crowned an adventurous youth passed in the mining regions of the Western States, by a daring winter expedition over the Sierras, in which he was so badly frozen that he afterwards lost both feet, but his tall and vigorous figure showed hardly a trace of this misfortune. Returning to Canada, he studied medicine; and eventually, in 1877, became the head of a large insane asylum at London, Ontario. Here he introduced several notable reforms in the treatment of the patients, which were widely imitated throughout America.