The requirements in the nurse were maturity, experience in the care of sick men, and the ability to take notes and keep a careful record. Dr. Bucke engaged a suitable person, and talked freely and unreservedly to her about the patient, his physical condition and his eccentric habits. He said it was his firm belief that his life could not last more than a few days longer, and that he was confident that another such room as the one he was in, littered and uncared for, did not exist upon the face of the earth. He further said that his poor old friend had been in wretched health for some years past, that he was in no way able to look out for himself, and that he was in the hands and at the mercy of a designing and unprincipled woman,--the unrefined and ignorant widow of a sailor,--who as a housekeeper was unreliable and dishonest, and who alone was responsible for the condition in which the sick room was to be found. He added that it had been arranged that the nurse should go out to all her meals at the expense of the patient's friends; that she was to have nothing whatever to do with the housekeeper, _and above all things she was not to allow her to enter the sick man's room_. To put the matter to her concisely, she was, during the entire engagement, long or short as it might prove, to speak to but three persons, these being the two literary executors living in Camden, Mr. Harned and Mr. Traubel, and her own colleague, Warren Fritzinger. He told her that the first things he desired her to do were to get the sick room into order, and to begin recording the daily transactions; she must be careful to note all Mr. Whitman's words as they were uttered, and to write them down faithfully. Dr. Bucke spoke as one having full authority, and the nurse had no reason for disbelieving anything he had said. (And ever after believed that Mrs. Davis had been cruelly maligned (but by whom?) and that Dr. Bucke, who lived at a distance and saw little of his friend's home life, had been deceived and misled.) He assured her that _money in abundance_ would be supplied for all the sick man's needs, and that it was the wish of his friends that he should have every comfort possible until the end. By a second appointment Dr. Bucke met the nurse at the ferry, and they set out together for the dying poet's home, the Doctor, while crossing the Delaware, repeating and dwelling upon what he had previously said.