I have been occupied with some pottering work in which I have had to keep my eyes constantly on the workman and to do something with my own hands. By night I have been so dogged tired that I could hardly sit up. So I have been putting off writing you.

Stout, of the Commission, offered to reprint the Memorial & he & others promised aid in canvassing. But very strangely no one has done anything & except from you I have had no assistance. Gardner, the Director of the Survey, has been preparing an elaborate report, with maps and cuts & photolithograph. A part of these were burned in the Boston fire. Since that I have heard nothing from him & only know that his proceeding is delayed. I have been expecting a summons to Albany about it for a fortnight but if it came should not at present be able to go. I have been hoping that the debate in the legislature would be so long postponed that I could take the business up again, canvass myself for signatures and get it in good shape. I want also to get time to write a report to be printed with Gardner’s report. In another week I hope to be more free.

What I have written will sufficiently show you the state of the case. I feel humiliated by my own inefficiency but I had reason to expect assistance which has failed me and I have been swamped with other & more imperative duties.

I still hope that the Memorial may be a factor of some importance in the affair. If so it will be mainly because of what you have done. I shall be glad to get the results of what you have done not already rendered but I cannot ask or advise you to be any further trouble. Only now please send me your own signature, & if convenient get Parkman’s. I need not say that I appreciate & regret the concern which your friend in Paris has had.

An incident today calls my attention to a matter which ought to way heavily on you. A question asked by two school girls led me to the knowledge that our common schools are provided with two works on Art & that by means of them Art is a regular branch of instruction. These girls had been through one & had had the wit to observe, soon after taking up the other, that the Art of one was not the Art of the other. One is Kane’s Elements, edited as a class book for the American market, the other is by “Mr Long” of Boston. I only mean that for good or evil it is a matter of importance. It strikes me that an elementary primer of art for common life would be very different from Kane’s Elements & that if Mr Long has made one which is in the least respectable, he deserves much more general public credit than he has received. I do hope that it is possible to give to common country folk even some idea of what art [446] is — enough for a starting point of such self education as may be possible toward a softer & finer life. Letting the leaves of Mr Long’s book slip through my fingers I get the impression that it is Picture Gallery Art that it mainly means. La Farge. came here with me. In the car I thought he had been some time asleep. He explained to me that he was greatly enjoying the landscape & colour in the low lying rain clouds, the beauty of which he then made me see — And I don’t suppose that in all the state of Delaware there were two others to whom it was apparent. This is a part of my idea of the true line of common School Art Education.

I write under a shed in the rain, while my men are off for dinner.