"Mother has been a friend to many; they have handled what money she had, amounting to hundreds of dollars. When she died all debts were cancelled as far as they were concerned, and not one would say: 'Here is five cents towards putting a good and faithful servant away.' But Mother was laid away as fine as anybody...." Little more need be said. Mrs. Davis was comparatively a young woman at the time of Walt Whitman's death,--being then in her fifty-fifth year,--and in the sixteen years that followed, his friends passed away one by one, and she almost passed out of the memory of his life, as though she had never taken part in it. But the part she did take deserves remembrance. Harry Fritzinger's letter speaks for itself, and I have tried, poorly as I may have done so, to speak for one whom I valued and value as a good woman and a loving friend. WALT WHITMAN'S MONUMENTS A LETTER WRITTEN IN CAMDEN ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH BY GUIDO BRUNO DEAR WALT WHITMAN: To-day is the 27th anniversary of your death. I came here to worship at your shrine. I am a European, you must know, and reverence of our great writers and artists is bred in us, is part of our early training. We love to visit the houses where genius lived, to see with our own eyes the places our great men loved. Camden hasn't changed much since you left. The people among whom you lived are to-day the same as they were then: petty, mean, vain, unforgiving. Your friends are few just as in the olden days. Let me tell you about it. It never entered my mind to make sure of the street number of your old residence. "Any child on the street will direct me," I thought, "to Whitman's house." Getting off the ferry, the same ferry on which you loved to ride back and forth, in spring and autumn, I asked a policeman how to get to your house. "The Whitman House?" he repeated; "it's somewhere out of the way, I'm sure. You had better stop in the Ridgely House. That's the best place in town." He knew nothing of you and thought I was looking for a hotel. A druggist at the nearby corner knew about you. "William Kettler used to be a great friend of his," he told me. "He'll tell you all about him." And he gave me Mr. Kettler's address. Mr. Kettler still lives on North Street, and has become chief city librarian lately. He's very deaf, but extremely kind and friendly. He was in the midst of moving. Mrs. Kettler is ill, you must know, and they will live on the shore for the rest of the season. "This Whitman cult makes me sick," he commenced. "Who was Whitman anyway? A poet? I dare say that there are hundreds of magazine writers to-day as there were during his lifetime, who write just as good verse as he did. And his prose is abominable. His writings are not fit to be read in a respectable home. They corrupt the mind and are dangerous to the morals. We knew him well, we saw him daily and his disgraceful way of living was open town talk.