I have had three good days in succession; sleeping five hours last night with only one sleeping dose (paraldahide) and feel myself today better, and am thought by the doctor to be better than since I first came to London (Chiselhurst). I begin to look ahead again and have allowed Marion to accept an invitation to go at the end of next week to the Waterhouses near Oxford, which she describes as a delightful country seat. I am not losing all the time I stay in hospital here. I have been driven out evy afternoon, either the doctor, Mrs Rayner, Marion or Rick going with me, evy day more or less on a different road, mostly through the delightful country to the Northd looking into, not entering, several private parks, visiting old church yards and making altogether quite a study of the manner in which London is colonizing its suburbs, and of the prevailing style of building and laying out villa grounds. I have kept myself from writing or much note-taking but have evy day laid out some Kodak work for Geo. Glessner and Rick who go out on the wheel to do it the next day, sometimes starting early and breakfasting at a distance, (as, yesterday, at Harrow on the Hill). They will have taken I suppose near a hundred photographs, chiefly of modern small villas & cottages, entrances, lych-gates, ivy hung walls, bridges, stables, inns, churches and roadside matters, all in the Northern suburbs. As the reconnaissance of Hyde & Regents Park, which I made with Phil the day before he left seemed to have set me back, I have not been again to any of the large parks or talked with anyone interested in our subjects, but I have visited several suburban cricket grounds, play fields, and out of door gymnasia and have twice driven through “Finsbury Park”; one of the smaller modern public grounds on the site of an old common— also twice walked thro’ Waterlow Park, which is a recent revisal of an old private park and garden for public use. (There has been little for us to learn in them, except what to avoid. We have photographs). Once the doctor went with us in a row boat on the Thames above Richmond but I think that he concluded that that was too interesting for me. If I continue gaining another day he will allow me to go to the Brit. Museum to look at various old books of which I brought from home a memorandum and others to which reference is made in Bloomfield or other of the books I have found in the Hampstead Library. I have been reading books on the history of London—the progress of suburban improvement chiefly; the history of commons, heaths and parks, and of roads and building operations. There is one example of a neighborhood park within five minutes walk of us. The only things that are as well done (contrived) here as with us are 1st entrances and approaches, (especially glass covered ways) [540]to urban, sub-urban houses; 2d, the management of houses and large “areas” where they are to be placed on the lower side of a road on a steep hillside. I find many capital illustrations of the principle that the suburban house and grounds should be one complete private house; privacy of the family being secured on the ground as well as within the house walls. {There} is a good custom of leaving the house doors open and having locks on the gates opening (when visitors ring, or tradesmen at the service gates) by a wire from the servants’ quarters. It is so at this house and when it is warm enough the tea table is habitually set out of doors, and half the reading, study and woman’s chair work is done in chairs on the turf on whatever happens to be the shady side of the buildings with no more sense of publicity than if under the roof. I intend to have an interview with a Hampstead “real estate agent” before I leave and learn something financially statistically and as to constructive specifications, if I can, before I leave. I am putting this and other things off only till the doctor lets me out of quarantine—other things suburbanish.

The last setback I had was because of a call from Radford. It was at night, and I was very near sending him word that I could not see him, and repented deeply that I had not. But, of course, I could not guess that he had anything unpleasant or rasping to tell me. It was his account of Vaux’s exhibition and humiliation and breakdown; told in a very bad way, without apparent sympathy and I am sure upon after reflection, with a much darker coloring than the facts required—i.e. just the bad contentious, English shop-keeping way. He said plainly that Vaux had been good for nothing, even architecturally, for a long time past; that he, Radford, had been the architect. (Vaux had only been in the way & a marplot) that in the final flurry with the Park Dept Vaux had acted against the advice of all his friends &c &c. I fell in with his view of Vaux’s character and failings at the time, but afterwards felt indignant with myself that I had done so and {was} exceedingly sorry for Vaux and that I could have done and could do nothing for him and his. Radford said, by the way, that Downing was good for nothing; made so many blunders and did all business so weakly that he had given Radford more trouble than his services in any way compensated. I believe Radford is here with a purpose of making arrangements for taking up on a larger scale and in a better way the business which he considers that Vaux is now disabled from attempting to follow. He thinks that Vaux has retired to Rondout, very poor. This was the impression he gave and, I think, intended to give me. As I said, it distressed me greatly and I had no sleep of value for the next two nights and days. He stayed two hours and I almost had to ask him to go. He meant no harm. It was only his unfortunate way. If Vaux is definitely retired, ought we not at once to think of enlarging our organization and having a strong branch office in New York? Of course, one of us would have to live there & to New Yorkers it would need to appear not a branch but a coequal principal. There are those 3000 acres of new parks to be laid out, and as to our getting the work it is a question of [541]Tammany vs. our reputation. I can’t say that I have any appetite for the fight that would be inevitable.

I was greatly relieved and comforted by Harry’s letter, chiefly about Chicago, of 21st June, received about a week ago. I have no need to comment upon it. The main questions ahead are chiefly mechanical, so to speak, as that of dredging and preserving the banks, and of ornamental gardening, as to which I expressed, I think, in my last note my leading thought, to wit, that the fashion here is altogether bad and that safety lies in simplicity and reserve for the most part. The less we have of detached flower beds; the less of obvious ornamental beds, the better. I have hardly seen anything yet of that kind that did not seem to me childish, vulgar, flaunting, or impertinent, out of place and discordant with good general effect. Only in banks, masses and trimmings—fringe like or garnish-like—against, under, and distinctly auxiliary, subordinate and supplemental to, architectural features, have I seen any of the floral or modern style of decorative gardening that was not offensive to me. I distrust even our intended gay trimmings along the paneled ground of the Grand Court, as far as I had ideas of what they were to be. But giving a good deal of latitude within certain fix’d reserved limits to Ulrich, with the aid of Millet, in determining these limits, and general principles as to colors, I am sure you will have respectable results. Of course I am personally weak on this side of the affair and therefore timid and undetermined. Otherwise, I am more than ever inclined to use a good deal of minor submonumental material all through the grounds, wherever it can be supplemental or brought into more or less distant relationship with architectural lines and masses. I mean vases and pillars and columns, vines in formal festoons and fastigiate and pyramidal shrubs and young trees. Irish yews, golden yews, thujas and Swedish Junipers, Lombardy poplars and other fastigiate, deciduous trees, all which may be largely imported, and, after use, probably sell well. I should add hollies but fear they wd not come out well after transportation the first year. About all this class of objects there can be a decorative mat if desirable—perfectly formal—of ground vegetation, as there may be, as suggested above, along the bases of all more fully architectural structures, terraces, pavilions and buildings. It was in such situations, I think, that Ulrich seemed to have been most successful at Monterey. I still think feasible and desirable, the contrivance of tower like features, objects, with sides pierced and galleries & cornices, out from which willow foliage and other, as of hops, Madeira vine, morning glory, yuccas &c. would grow, nearly clothing them, emphasizing and decorating lightly their essential architectural outlines and features.

One of the few new things we have come upon is a contrivance for giving people seats where they may find shelter from winds as well as [542]rains by means of glass screens. Phil will tell you how these were formed in several French railway station platforms. Here they are found of various forms in public gardens—the little gardens formed on old burial ground sites, the glass part being in plan sometimes no more than this: (the dark lines being glazed above the height of armed seats at the centre); so that old people and weakly children may sit always on one side or another protected from evry wind. In some of the Railway stations these are simply glazed boxes with seats in the middle, thus high glass screens on all sides. The arrangement leaves all on the seats exposed to view as much as if there was no protection against the wind.

The only cloud I see over the Exposition now is the Cholera. The accounts from Russia and Paris this morning are alarming. In Paris the ante-cholera, the forerunning bowel-complaint, which I remember of old, seems to be raging and the authorities show their alarm by efforts to hide and misrepresent it.

I am anxious to hear how you have got on with the Muddy River work—planting and all.

I suppose you will have seen Blumfield’s book to which I have referred above. Robinson told Phil that he had a reply in book form coming out. I have seen nothing of it. There is a fight coming—or rather it is now fully on—I am sure that a complete return to the old formal gardening is to be desired rather than that the present confused, contradictory hash of formal, natural gardening should continue. The tendency to formality is very strong here, and as for a true natural style I see nothing of it. Whatever comes we hold the right position and sooner or later public opinion will find that we do. If there is going to be much discussion we may “point with pride” to Washington, Biltmore, and I hope, to what you are doing at Newport and Whitelaw Reid’s, Twombley’s, as {happy} illustrations of the application of sound principles to official circumstances. I have not seen Robinson, nor indeed any of the three or four men here whom I want to see for professional reasons. I was going to write about Biltmore planting preparations, and some other matters but a growing “stitch in the side” warns me to get out of the house. I sent a message by Phil about the garden wall. I hope no coping will have been done, and that the pavilion (?) on the corner of the South terrace will not be completed till I return. I feel sure that something more than Hunt contemplates is wanted there.

I am very glad to hear by John’s note to Rick, just given me as I was writing, that you feel that the office is better organized and your work all well in hand. It is impossible for me to say quite yet when I can come home, but if I do not slip back from my present apparent condition I shall probably try in two or three days to secure a berth with Rick—to return by New York in time for him to join his class at the end of the College summer vacation.

Affctly.