I have received your note of the 18th instant from Paul Smith’s.

I regard your article as being a feat in that kind of work. I cannot tell you how I have suffered during many years through reports based more or less upon interviews with me. On one occasion I met, perhaps upon a street railway, a gentleman and a friend, with whom I had some casual conversation in regard to a public work in which I was engaged. I forgot at the time that he was an occasional writer for a New York daily paper. When I came to read the newspapers at the breakfast table the next morning, I found an article evidently written by him as the result of our conversation the day before, of such a character that it made me so ill that my wife, seeing my paleness, thought I was fainting away and ran to get remedies.

There are one or two things in your article which I wish were not there. One is the statement about the transverse roads, which you made from a recollection of what I said to you of the manner in which the suggestion for these roads grew out of an experience of fire engines running across the park. There is nothing literally untrue in your statement, and yet it is hardly just to Vaux. He seized, I remember, upon my tentative suggestion with the greater eagerness because of his familiarity with some construction partially serving a similar purpose in the zoological garden in Regent’s Park. Another is that I am spoken of as “Editor” of Putnam’s Magazine. Curtis and Dana were the editors, behind the door. They were carefully concealed. All editorial correspondence was in the third person. I was rather the Secretary of the editor. I never appeared as the editor, but only as the broker between the editor and the contributor, printers, etc. I was by no means competent to be the editor.

You say that you are going to Mount Royal. I do hope that you will have a fine day there, for the panoramic spectacle is sometimes superb. You know that there was a bad blundering in the work under our plan there, but I think you will realize that it was the design to preserve and develop the characteristic scenery of the mountain, while securing fairly convenient access to it and exhibition of it, and other accommodations for crowds of people. I hope that you will go to Quebec and enjoy the suburbs as well as the town. It is the most interesting town and neighborhood north of Mexico. In saying this, I refer, among other things, to the old cottages of the habitants, some of which, you will see, for example, in the drive to Montmorenci. From these Richardson took hints, at my suggestion, which he afterwards turned to practical use.

I am going South, to be absent three or four weeks.

Sincerely Yours

[695]