There would be many and serious disadvantages attending the erection of a temporary refectory on the mountain adapted to serve your purpose for five (5) years, as you have proposed and, on considering the matter more carefully I have thought it better to submit to you another proposition. I have for this purpose had prepared a study for a plan for a house to be built at the crown of the mountain, in accordance with a suggestion before made to you, which I herewith send. The whole plan would provide tables and seats for nearly 300 visitors at a time but is adapted for the serving only of light refreshments & for summer use, it being assumed that you will have another house in a lower and more sheltered position for a dinner business & for winter. The plan will, upon a little study, sufficiently explain itself. I need only remark that what is named “the bar” is the place for the manager and for the sale of hand articles — cakes, cigars, & soda water &c. The room marked “parcels &c” is a place of deposit for baskets, cloaks &c. for visitors; the space marked “Ombra” is an open gallery or veranda similar to but broader than that showed on the opposite of the house in the perspective sketch A.

The house is designed to be built of wood in a common and inexpensive way, its effect depending on the form & general style adopted, which is not essentially different from that of the best old French farm houses of the Dominion. It is to be covered chiefly with shingles, except the canopy of the tower which is designed to appear at a distance like a crown and to be overlaid with tin — or if you can afford it with gilded copper. The architect has not quite met my intention in the tower but you will recognize the general idea.

I mean the tower to be high enough to be seen from and to command a view over the nearer part of the city and I have arranged a large open belvidere over the main body of the house at a height at which it is expected that more distant views will be obtained over and through the tops of the trees. It is intended that this place shall also be used for the refectory business.

I propose that you shall immediately build so much of this structure as is shown on Sheet C. and shall for this summer place a tent where, in the full plan, the room lettered “Refectory” stands. This will give you in good form all the special conveniences needed & accommodations for the lodging &c of the manager and servants.

Considering the greater economy of the arrangment in the long run, I do not think that the cost of adopting this plan will be so much beyond what you have intended to layout upon a temporary house that you will feel that you cannot afford it.

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Not knowing your laws, I suggest that it may be practicable for you to make an arrangment by which the whole of the structure might be built at once at the expense of a lessee on a long lease with proper conditions & security.

Please return the studies and inform whether my proposition can be entertained.