You are always so quick and thorough in helping me in any matter that I bring to your attention that I am learning reserve. Otherwise I shouldn’t have been a week in Boston without saying a word to you about the arboretum, which project is at a crisis. I don’t think there is anything for you to do about it but I guess that you will like to know about it.

The college has 118 acres appropriated to the arboretum. Not more [489] than half of it is really well adapted to a classified collection. The rest will do for illustrations of forestry &c. The city is now authorized upon my proposition to condemn 37 acres in two parcels, one at each end of the college tract. On the 155 acres, much the best arboretum in the world can be formed. The scheme is that the city shall lease the condemned land to the college on a nominal rent for a thousand years and that the college shall establish and maintain the arboretum; that the city shall in good time layout a road & walk (2 1/4 miles) through it & that the public shall be admitted to it under no regulations or restrictions other than such as are usual in well-kept public grounds. The college is to reserve the right to keep the gates closed when it shall think desirable until 10 o’ck in the morning. The college is also to hold exclusively within the enclosure 10 acres of land to be used for special collections, museums, lecture rooms and administrative duties. The city is to provide police and water without charge.

This is the whole of the scheme as I would have it. I am sure that it is a capital bargain for both parties. If it fails it will be because of some reserve, caution or lack of push at the college end and of indifference and jealousy, growing from ignorance at the city end.

I am perfectly confident that if any man fully understanding the case were to make it his business to talk it over and explain it to the Common Councilmen, it could be carried. I always find the prospect bad when I arrive in Boston and good when I leave. The difficulties are all difficulties of ignorance or of the imagination.

The arrangment would cost the college nothing and the result would be immeasurably more creditable to it. The city would get a very valuable, novel and interesting pleasure ground at about one quarter what it would otherwise have to pay for it.

The sole difficulty is that nobody (feeling free to act) is really alive to the opportunity. I have been shaking Dalton and Sargent and have tried to stir up Mr Pulsifer of the Herald upon whom I called for the purpose. I hope something will come of it next week but not confidently.