I have just recvd yours of 14th and look for your next with anxiety. Whatever occurs I hope that you will regard the present aspect of affairs as temporary. Public opinion and even Aldermanic opinion will turn again. At any rate parks must be taken care of and one element of competency in taking care of them lies in adjusting the method of managment as far as indispensably necessary to existing conditions of municipal government. The report of Mr Evarts’ Commission after two years study of the subject records the conviction that there is no use in attempting to overcome the chief source of bad government of cities while the conditions of service of the general government remain what they have been. In what is now occurring at Washington let us hope that we see a glimmer of better days dawning.

The names on your map now strike me with one or two exceptions as studiously common place and cheap. If you set about fixing names on the park don’t you think there should be found some slight flavor of quaintness among them and that it is possible to have this without running into mawkishness? I think that I should prefer, unless the process can be carried further and better, [305] to continue to omit names from the map—at least to omit all the matter of course descriptive names, such as the South bay, the North bay, the East bay. I don’t like the "Look Out” because the place is not sufficiently entitled (rather than any other) to the distinction—besides it is a cheap appropriation. I think that I would not note the landings and if I did so I would not say (superfluously) boat landing. The French entrance is very bad when we have the better English gate. If the Commission have an objection to gate it is probably based on a misapprehension. It means a passage not the instrument for barring a passage. The city gate is the entrance and outlet of the city not the port cullis which stops entrance and outgoing. I would now substitute Bosky-banks for Coppice banks—(coppice means wood never allowed to grow large) "North Meadow gate” strikes me now as cumbrously long. I should prefer—though it is cheap—North gate. Northmead gate, Southmead gate would perhaps do better. I would certainly not say "Park-way Gate”—better Beechbank gate or Lincoln gate—or Main gate or City gate. By all means Sedgwood gate not South meadow.

I think that I will give any of the Douglass farm trees that remain worth moving to Central Park. Please send me an authorization to take them which can be used by Mr Fischer or anyone sent from the park.