I sent you a T.W. letter yesterday, address, Wellington Hotel, but not being perfectly sure that that was right will address this care of Director Columbian Ex. I told you that I was planning to go to Atlanta Wednesday, returning Saturday to spend Sunday here. If you feel that I can justly to our interests in Chicago stay longer, and write me so, I shall.

Mr Vanderbilt and all are pleased with the work on Ram Branch but I am much dissatisfied with it in several respects, Gall having missed the idea so that to make it as I would have it a great deal of work must be wasted. I don’t know that he is to be blamed. He simply is not familiar enough with what I aim at to rightly understand my instructions and goes ahead in full confidence that what he does will please me. I am sorry that I did not pull that bridge down. I have been all along on the ground for four hours this Sunday afternoon trying to find some way out of the scrape. I feel mortified and conscious-stricken. John writes that we ought to spend more time at Rockwood, which is what you say. But the precept is many times more applicable to Biltmore. What is going to become of us if we get engaged with Chicago?

Our plan for the Pergola essentially approved and applauded, but Hunt suggests improvements, which are good and wh. I adopt cheerfully.

I wish that I had your help about the Ram Branch muddle.

[220]

At all other points yet studied matters are shaping well—but I see some clouds rising from the Agricultural side.

While writing, Mr. V. brings me your letter of 17th. I take your view of every thing. I shd hardly think that you wd succeed in getting the compensation & terms you propose, but I don’t object to your feeling your way to it, and striking for it, if you wish. I am prepared to say that we had better retire if we cannot get it. If we take it, we must make some enlarged arrangemts for other business and must decline commissions that we wd otherwise take. I was never before so impressed with the wrong of our present position. I should like to give myself up to this place. We cannot do it instead by visiting a week at a time three times a year. I rode this morning over some of the newly bought farms, seeing more interesting ground and better trees than any I had seen before. It struck me that I had never begun to think what a big chore we had before us when the Topog. Survey shall be complete to duly plan out the laying out of the Estate. We shall need, one of us, to be familiar with the topography of a region twelve times as large as Franklin Pk. divided by two rivers and a dozen brooks before we can begin. I think that it would take me a week, clear of all other duties to piece out what I know of at present, sufficiently to feel that I could safely adopt a provisional theory of roads. Mr Vanderbilt said today that he had been planning a scheme of roads that would require but three bridges over the French Broad. I can see that our difficulties are to be greatly increased by the schemes of Burnet and the Baron. I heard part of a long letter from the Baron, in which he was contemplating a sort of magnified Deerfoot Farm, but with additions to the sausage and butter departments of sheep, orchards, vineyards, &c. &c. all on a great scale.

Let me hear from you here, next Sunday, advising if I can safely stay two to four days, before going to Nashville.

Faithfully,