I fear no mere visiting once a day of a doctor will do her any good--she needs hygienic treatment--massage (a woman works here every day on the patients who need rubbing & massage), feeding up (I have never yet seen a patient whom we could not make eat, appetite or not, by aid of beef-tea & milk), perfect rest, & judicious treatment. Dr. Berlin is a learned, charming woman of 28--she takes advanced views, gives no medicine at all in some cases, & if any, few at a time, but efficient. She is perfectly unaffected, very intelligent, & has been thoroughly trained. She is a Russian. Please give my love to Mrs. Whitman & remember me to Colonel Whitman. This afternoon, when driving with Mr. Marvin, I thought of the pleasant drives I have had with Colonel Whitman. Yours affectionately, BEATRICE C. GILCHRIST. If it were not for records accumulating mountain high I should have time to write to my friends. LETTER XL ANNE GILCHRIST TO WALT WHITMAN _Sept. 3, '78. Chesterfield, Mass._ I am half afraid Herby has got a malarious place by his description. MY DEAREST FRIEND: I had a lingering hope--till Herby went south again--that I should have a letter from you, in answer to mine, saying you were coming up to see us here. In truth, it was a great disappointment to me, his going back to Philadelphia instead of your joining us, or him, either here or somewhere near to New York. I wonder where that North Amboyna is that you once mentioned to me--and what kind of a place it is. I have had a long, quiet time here, and have enjoyed it very much--never did I breathe such sweet, light, pure air as is always blowing freely over these rocky hills. Rocky as they are--and their sides & ravines are strewn with huge boulders of every conceivable size & shape--they nourish an abundant growth of woods, and I fancy the farmers here do a great deal better with their winter crops of lumber and bark and maple sugar than with their summer one of grain & corn. I expect Herby has described our neighbours to you--specially Levi Bryant, the father of my hostess--a farmer who lives just opposite and has put such heart & soul and muscle & sinew into his farming that he has continued to win quite a handsome competence from this barren soil (it isn't muscle & industry only that are wanted here--but pluck and endurance) hauling his timber up & down over the snow & through the drifts, along roads that are pretty nearly vertical. I am never tired of hearing his stories (nor he of telling them) of hairbreadth escapes for him & his cattle--when the harness or the shafts have broken under the tremendous strain--& nothing but coolness & daring have got him or them out of it alive. Generally, as he sits talking, his little boy of eleven who bids fair to be like him and can now manage a team or a yoke of oxen as well as any man in the parish--and work almost as hard--sits close by him leaning his head on his father's shoulder or breast--for the rugged