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  Dear Walt Whitman,

Since the receipt of your last letter to Dr Johnston, I cannot help thinking continually about you and the—complicated disorders your letter reported. And so,—though I have nothing else to write about,—I  want to send you a line or two again to express my loving sympathy with you and my best wishes. I hope that you are better than when you wrote, & I am anxious to hear a better report.

After about a fortnight's frost, we have had today a heavy fall of snow. The young moon shines brightly tonight, &  it is again freezing. It seems likely that we shall have an "old-fashioned" (frosty) Christmas.

The weather is very different to that in which Dr Johnston visited you, and I try to imagine you—in these short, dark days—confined to the room which Dr J's description & photographs  have made so familiar—solitary and ill—It reminds me of my mother's condition in her last years—lame, suffering & much alone—and my heart goes out to you like a son's.

But, as circumstances darkened, she herself only seemed to grow sweeter and more loveable,—more  loving, tender & self-forgetting and her faith deeper and brighter. And I, too, learned to love her more & more.

Day by day your influence is spreading, and new friends are learning to appreciate and to love you, with grateful reverence, and a personal affection such as no one  ever aroused before.—I am deeply grateful that I, for one, am—privileged to write to you, and to act as spokesman for an increasing multitude of others who are not so privileged, but who, like myself, will think of you at this season with loving good-will and tender sympathy. God bless you & all your household

Yours affectionately J. W. Wallace