Twenty-second street north of Ridge avenue is a quiet stretch of red brick, with occasional outcroppings of pale yellow-green stone. At the noon hour it is a cascade of children, tumbling out of the Joseph Singerly Public School. Happily for those juveniles, there is one of the best tuck shops in Philadelphia at the corner of Columbia avenue. It is worth a long journey to taste their cinnamon buns. And in the block just behind the school, at 1929 North Twenty-second, there is a little three-story yellow-green house with a large bay window, which gives Whitman lovers a thrill. That little house is associated with one of the most poignant and curious romances in the story of American letters. For it was here that Mrs. Anne Gilchrist and her children came in September, 1876, and lived until the spring of 1878. Mrs. Gilchrist, a noble and talented English woman, whose husband had died in 1861, fell passionately in love with Walt after reading "Leaves of Grass." Her letters to Walt, which were published recently by Thomas Harned, are among the most searchingly beautiful expressions of human attachment. After Whitman's paralytic stroke Anne Gilchrist insisted on coming from London to Philadelphia to be near the poet and help him in any way she could; and to this little house on Twenty-second street Walt used to go day after day to take tea with her and her children. Walt had tried earnestly to dissuade her from coming to America, and his few letters to her seem a curiously enig-
