Beyond this fashionable district, the "Back Bay Fens" have been skillfully laid out in a series of boulevards and parks, making a chain extending several miles south and southwest through the suburbs, Franklin Park, covering nearly a square mile, being the chief. Here, on grounds with great natural adornments, in Roxbury, Brookline, and Brighton, is a region of much beauty. The surface is undulating, finely wooded, dotted with lakes, and displaying many costly suburban houses, in full glory of garden and foliage. This pleasant region spreads to Chestnut Hill, where the city has its great water reservoir, holding eight hundred million gallons, the favorite drive from Boston being to and around this reservoir, the route giving splendid views from the hilltop. Jamaica Pond and Jamaica Plain are near by, two of Boston's attractive cemeteries being beyond the latter, Mount Hope and Forest Hills. Here is also the famous Arnold Arboretum, the greatest institution of its kind, now part of the park system, and having a grand outlook from its central hill. In West Roxbury is the Martin Luther Orphan Home, which now occupies the noted "Brook Farm," where a group of cultivated people, led by George Ripley, and including Hawthorne, Curtis, Dana, Channing, Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, made their famous attempt to found a socialistic community in 1841, but found that it would not work. It was described as an experiment in "plain living and high thinking," the articles of association calling it the "Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education," for the establishment of an "agricultural, literary, and scientific school or college." Pupils were taken, and in its most successful period there were about one hundred and fifty persons in the community; "kitchen and table were in common; very little help was hired, but philosophers, clergymen and poets worked at the humblest tasks, milking cows, pitching manure, cleaning stables, etc., while cultivated women cooked, washed, ironed, and waited at table; all work, manual or intellectual, was credited to members at a uniform rate of ten cents an hour." Later, it became a Fourieristic "phalanstery," under the title of the "Brook Farm Phalanx;" then, in 1845, the chief building burnt down, and financial difficulties following, the experiment, which had excited world-wide comment, was abandoned in 1847. NONATUM AND SUDBURY.