Your mother has gone to Cummington to be with Miss Bryant during the festival in commemoration of her father. Marion and I returned a few days ago from Deer Isle leaving the cottage there in occupation of the Croswels. A letter came yesterday from Rick written from a tent on a mountain height from which he was at frequent intervals reading and recording signals from a distant peak. There is no indication that he is well employed in respect to professional education, but he must be under good training for accuracy and must be acquiring information as to Coast Survey methods &c of some value and incidentally must be getting stocked with knowledge of Colorado trees &c. and establishing his constitution. Reports from Biltmore indicate fair progress in the Arboretum Road. I shall calculate to go there in October and hope that we may begin planting the Arboretum next winter. I shall ask Rick to meet me there if practicable & hope to establish him. You will do well to see carefully everything of a real Arboretum character that you can—that will be Kew, first, (the Arboretum is distinct from the Botanic Garden), next the Pinetum at Dropmore between Windsor and Oxford. This I saw but gave less time to it than I should. I thought it very fine and I would have you take photographs first, to show its general character; that is to say broadish views; second, nearer, to show a few trees particularly, third to show the labels (which are poor). I think that there is also some affair of an Arboretum character off to the Southwest of London which I did not see but if you can hear of it, as that is a very interesting rural region and fine for cycling, you may do it.

I hope that you got a note that I wrote you from Deer Isle, giving advice as to what you should see, more particularly in the Derbyshire and “Dukeries” direction. Rick got no photographs of Kew, (of the Arboretum at Kew) or of the Thames Embankment; (as to some points of which details & measurements might be of value) or of any of the revised church yard public gardens of Miss Carpenter’s designing. But that which we in America are most backward and uncivilized in, one gets the best education in simply observing the ordinary English middle class home out of doors: the arrangement of yards and alleys, stables and outhouses, fences, lawns & gardens. I made my way to the stables and yards whenever I could. And often a rural inn gives most instructive examples in this way.

I suggest that you make an outer and an inner circuit, on bicycle, of the London Suburbs; first a line taking in Greenwich, Sydenham, Norwood, Hampsted and Highgate; next an outer circuit. I don’t know in which would come Chiselhurst and Bromley; both should come in as parts of suburban London with many cottages and cottage grounds of the class most nearly corresponding with that class of suburban residencies with which we have most [811]to do. It was Chiselhurst & the region about Hampsted and Highgate that I became most familiar with. There is a suburb (with substantial street arrangements being formed on the old ________ park (occupied by Louis {Napoleon’s} widow) at Chiselhurst, and on the opposite side of the town some nice suburban places. In fact in both the towns I suggest you would be passing small suburban places, suitable for Brookline, half the time; mixed up with farms and parks and villages. There is a town on the South Coast, advertised a good deal in the Railway Stations; a town largely of holiday houses mixed with woods and downs I judged, and which I heard spoken of as a good example, of English town of that character as built today. I meant to have visited it but was cut off. I do not recall its name. You will see the advertismt. If you go bicycling to the South Coast, on the way to Southampton, for example, try to cycle through Selbourne and get some photographs of it. Buy, first, and read a good library edition of White’s Natural History of Selbourne. It is very little off the most direct road to Portsmouth and parts of this road I remember to be interesting. I think that Dickens’s place, Gads Hill is on it, not far out of London.

While at Deer Isle I got to sleeping well but am sleepless again here—Slept not more than an hour last night and am feeling used up; unfit for any business today. I do not seem in other respects to have picked up from my break down at St Paul.

Park business in Boston seems to have got badly tangled. I do not at all like the situation especially of the Jamaica Park work. We are at cross-purposes with the Commission. I am expected to go with Eliot to Brooklyn and some private places but fear I shall not be able to.

Your affcte father