On your return from Biltmore you will have found our communication on the subject of the projected Arboretum sent you on the 30th of last month. At the time it was completed I was under strong pressure to get to Cincinnati on professional business as soon as possible. I had delayed my departure in order to carry the report to the point which I did. I had forgotten that you intended to pass the holidays at Biltmore. You were still there when I passed through New York on my return from Cincinnati.

I have engagements which will detain me here until after Monday next. If you would like to see me any day after that, please let me know and I will come to New York.

I trust that you realize that we consider the whole Arboretum project as still in a strictly formative condition. I was sorry before attempting to present it to you even in the way I did, that I could not have advanced it one step further, and then, before presenting it to you, take counsel upon it with Professor Sargent. But I recognize that you might feel that we hardly had a right to go even as far as we did before advising you more fully what we were tentatively aiming at. I have explained to you why we did not. The opportunity of starting an arboretum of greater value than any other in the world, and of doing this as comparatively small expense exclusively for the Arboretum, has appeared to us one of almost momentous importance, and we have felt that we could not be over-cautious in laying such foundations of it as might prove to have been laid when we should submit to you even an outline plan of it.

You will have seen, I hope, that we have all along been giving our best study to the purpose of making the special cost of the Arboretum proper small relatively to its value and the satisfaction which, in our judgment, you, would, in after days, find in it.

You will see that we have designed that the trees of the Arboretum, {…} in a great degree, but take the place of those that you would probably plant between the road and the body of the forest if you did not give this strip of planting the name and purpose of an arboretum.

You will consider, also, that the required stock will have been procured at remarkably low cost; nine-tenths of it having been propagated in your own nursery from stock, most of which was originally obtained at trade prices.

We do not wish to have you think that the road which we are proposing to lay out between the two faces of the Arboretum is to have precisely the courses which we should advise for a circuit road of that part of the Estate in which it is to lie, which it would have regardless of the special purpose of the Arboretum. But we do not wish that such adjustments of its course as we would [736]propose from regard to the Arboretum should materially lessen its value as a road for general purposes, and we are quite willing and prepared to carefully consider the question whether the courses of the road now provisionally laid down may not, with further study, be better adjusted to all requirements. It is with reference to study of such possible adjustments that I hope that you will consent, if you have not already, to the opening of a trail as we have requested, and as to which we have given Thompson necessary instructions.

Respectfully Yours,