Early in the year 1863—I think in the final month—I lay on a cot in Mother Whippy's Ward at Judiciary Sqre Hospt. in Washington D.C. sick "Nigh unto death" when there came in one day, with charitable intent, a stalwart man of genial appearance & seemingly past the middle age since his hair & face beard were plentifully sprinkled with white. This man (whose frame, as I afterward found, was no mean type of the generous heart within) came to my bed, sat down, & after some talk with me wrote a letter to my parents in Michigan. This act secured my gratitude & we became intimately acquainted & close friends—Being furloughed in July '63 & discharged while in Mich. I lost sight of my friend & I am not sure that I even heard of him until I returned in '64 with an ugly bullet hole through my left lung that time finding a lodgment at Armory Sqr. Hospt .
My friend was still in Washington, we met, & our intimacy was renewed and again abruptly broken off in the summer of '65 when I was transferred to New Haven & soon afterward discharged from the service. Although I have never since heard a word from my quondam friend, still the name Walt Whitman is a household one in our family & the picture (by Schaff) with the autograph, Walt Whitman 1863 written in pencil in the margin to the right is lying here on the table having been brought down stairs a little while ago to be compared with one which appears in Leslie's for April 8th & which I brought up Friday with the Sunday N.Y. papers.
The question that naturally comes to us now is this, Is this Walt Whitman,—"the Poet of health & strength," our Walt Whitman of old? Everybody who has seen the two pictures says they are of the same man—If it indeed be true, I am very glad for I shall, I know, hear from my old friend—I am married, live here, (my mother living with us) & have charge of one of the public schools (No. 13) of the city.
I shall take a lively interest in the arrival of the postman for some time hereafter in the hope that I am what the rest so confidently assert:
Your old friend,