Your welcome2 card of 16th3 came to hand yesterday. My brother Eustace (Duke)4 was back again for the day and left for home (Ottawa) at 5.30 last evening. Splendid sleighing here and I thoroughly enjoy it—get out for a good drive every day—sometimes twice.
This morning the air is cold but the sun shining like a lovely June morning, have just been to North Building with Dr. Beemer5 all going well and quietly at asylum. In the city the meter6 affairs go on as usual "slow but sure" I think we shall be turning out meters within a month from now, have begun making but are not in a position yet to make all the parts [illegible] turn out meters. Xmas holidays [cutaway] us a little delay but not much.
RM BuckeCorrespondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).