It has today for the first time, become evident to me that my memory as to recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted. If Rick had not been with me and had not privately set me right I should have shown this fact in a flagrant way to Mr Vanderbilt. I think it my duty to tell you this at once in order that you may take measures to guard the business from possible consequences. I try to look at the situation from an outside and impersonal point of view and so looking at it I see that I ought no longer to be trusted to carry on important business for the firm alone. This simply because I am liable to such lapses of memory as to recent experiences, as, for example, to instructions received verbally, that I cannot be depended on to properly represent the firm. I think that I have no right to conceal this, or to delay telling you of it. I have no reason to think that I have lost capacity in respect to invention, design or reasoning powers in any respect, only that my memory (or presence of mind) in regard to recent occurrences is less trustworthy than it has been. It follows, simply, for the present, that it will be prudent for you and Eliot to trust a little less to my presence of mind in interviews with clients than you prudently might hitherto; to recognize that I am intuitively less ready to take risks and more distrustful [921]of myself than I have been and that I have a slower-working memory of recent occurrences.

I do not quite like to undertake alone such business as ought to {be} done in Washington and Philadelphia next week. Perhaps this is in a considerable degree because I do not think that I am as well versed in the facts of the present situation of affairs in these places as I should be, but it is also in part because of a growing distrust of my presence of mind in matters the consideration of which involves action of memory of comparatively recent occurrences. Precisely that condition, I suppose, which lends to the rule that military and naval officers shall be retired at seventy.

I suppose that I am a little affected physically, as I always have been in previous visits, by the elevation of this place but I do not think that I can rightly conceal from you the fact that I am more distrustful of myself than I have ever before been and am less willing to operate alone in matters of considerable importance, like this of the Biltmore Arboretum, for example.

As to conjunctions at Washington, Brooklyn &c. we will do the best we can by telegraphic correspondence. I simply now do not want to deal with these matters alone.

Yours affectionately