stage-driver comes. He
seems always to have had a special liking for this class of workmen. One
of the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in the
latter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to that
institution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage-drivers.
"These drivers," says the doctor, "like those of the omnibuses in London,
were a set of men by themselves. A good deal of strength, intelligence,
and skillful management of horses was required of a Broadway stage-driver.
He seems to have been decidedly a higher order of man than the driver of
the present horse-cars. He usually had his primary education in the
country, and graduated as a thorough expert in managing a very difficult
machine, in an exceptionally busy thoroughfare.

"It was this kind of a man that so attracted Walt Whitman that he was
constantly to be seen perched on the box alongside one of them going up
and down Broadway. I often watched the poet and driver, as probably did
many another New Yorker in those days.

"I do not wonder as much now as I did in 1860 that a man like Walt Whitman
became interested in these drivers. He was not interested in the news of
every-day life--the murders and accidents and political convulsions--but
he was interested in strong types of human character. We young men had not
had experience enough to understand this kind of a man. It seems to me now
that we looked at Whitman simply as a kind of crank, if the word had then
been invented. His talk to us was chiefly of books, and the men who wrote
them: especially of poetry, and what he considered poetry. He never said
much of the class whom he visited in our wards, after he had satisfied
himself of the nature of the injury and of the prospect of recovery.

"Whitman appeared to be about forty years of age at that time. He was
always dressed in a blue flannel coat and vest, with gray and baggy
trousers. He wore a woolen shirt, with a Byronic collar, low in the neck,
without a cravat, as I remember, and a large felt hat. His hair was iron
gray, and he had a full beard and mustache of the same color. His face and
neck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air. He was large, and gave
the impression of being a vigorous man. He was scrupulously careful of his
simple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy."

During the early inception of "Leaves of Grass" he was a carpenter in
Brooklyn, building and selling small frame-houses to wor