As the Press gives us very frequent reports of your health &c we have refrained writing you. Knowing you would like to hear from us & reatives we write you. Margaretta has had cough 4 or 5 weeks, some better now. I am not well, old bowel trouble. No relative here seriously ill. Have not heard from the Townsend2 Tribe lately. We sincerely sympathise with you and with the knowledge of your retention of intelect . We join in our best Love to you, neither being able to meet you in person.
Margaretta & William A. Avery.Correspondent:
Margaretta Avery was a cousin of
Whitman's mother Louisa Van Velsor Whitman; she and her husband William lived in
Brooklyn and visited Whitman when he was in Camden, at which time Whitman sold
Margaretta a copy of Two Rivulets and gave her a copy of
Memoranda During the War (See Walt
Whitman: Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White [New York: New York
University Press, 1978], 1:44n115).