I am sorry to say that I do not feel myself capable of being a landscape gardener—properly speaking—but I have a better and more cultivated taste in that department of art than any other, very much—having none in any other—and if I had the necessary quality of memory, or if my memory had been educated in botany and gardening when I was young, I might have been. But I can do anything with proper assistants, or money enough—anything that any man can do. I can combine means to ends better than most, and I love beautiful landscapes and rural recreations and people in rural recreations—better than anybody else I know. But I don’t feel strong on the art side. I don’t feel myself an artist, I feel rather as if it was sacrilegious in me to post myself in the portals of Art.

Yes, I know you are indignant and vexed with me, but I speak one truth, and it has got to be reconciled with all the rest—like Dr Bellows’s sermons.

I have none of your feeling of nauseousness about the park. There is no other place in the world that is as much home to me. I love it all through & all the more for the trials it has cost me.

I should like very well to go into the Brooklyn park, or anything else—if I really believed I could get a decent living out of it—but in landscape work in general I never had any ground for supposing that I could. You used to argue that I might hope to—that’s all. I could never see it.

I hope my report—which goes by the same mail with this—will be published. It completly exposed the main facts of the Swindle, and I have no doubt will perfectly satisfy the most dissatisfied man that my managmnt has been cautious and good—all that could have been asked of any man.

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There was not one of the deposits which gave the Estate its reputation which had not been completely worked out and exhausted before I took charge of it. I have tested them at a cheap rate—have reduced the current rates of expense in every department and have proved the Estate to be nearly worthless under present circumstances, so no more swindling can well be done with it. If the report is not published by the Trustees, I think it most likely I shall be relieved, and then I will publish it myself—if that seems proper—the substance of it, I will, anyhow.

I expect to be at leisure again in a few days & then to make a trip into the Yo Semite.

We ride every day to the top of the mountain, where Mrs O and I are doing some child’s play gardening work, and where we make tea—in sight of the Yo Semite & 5000 feet high—the change of air from the valley being delicious.

I hope you will do a good deal for the new Federal Weekly which I hear is starting and which I am invited to write for.