Yours of 5th just received. Pray do not imagine that we do not understand and sympathize with your anxiety to have at least Codman with you just now. Perhaps you do not as well understand that day after day we feel more and more the hazard of any attempt to settle anything until we have had opportunity of reviewing the general design with the data in hand that will be supplied by the topographical maps now preparing & which we are daily hoping to receive, and with the advantage of passing the conclusions at which the exhibit may arrive as the result of this last week’s meeting in New York. With these advantages it will not take us long to come to fixed points of departure, from which we can proceed with much more confidence than we have yet had that all the thought that we gave to the matter might not be wasted. We suppose that this point may be reached in a day or two, and we feel that if it can, we here (the three Landscape Architects) should have a chance to help one another by debate and conference before Codman goes again to Chicago. Codman thinks as we all do that these matters will be farther advanced by the end of this week if he remains here three or four days longer than if he started at once.

I think that we may hope to reach some solid bottom by the end of this week. Yet I am not without a good deal of fear that the {Grandees} will compel changes to be made, that will be serious—changes that will make it better that the present plan should be abandoned altogether and a new start made. The worst thing that could happen must be a compromise by which the distinguishing merits of the plan as it now stands, would be sacrificed. An entirely new design, a design with radically different motives, would be much better than the present design mutilated.

Yours faithfully,