DEAR ALICE: What an age it seems since I left Boston and exchanged the peace and quiet of my dear old attic room for all this turmoil and whirl of excitement! I have done more thinking in the last two months than ever before in my life, and sometimes I feel as though every idea had been squeezed out of my brain. If it were not that I insist upon getting some hours every week for a canter in the park, I fear I should be in a state of nervous collapse. However, I am beginning to see my way clear, and hope to get away in a month or so and be off to the West. Then when I get a conscience tolerably clear I shall run riot like a school-boy out of school. Just now I am buried deep in tenement house problems. I have had two or three conclaves of all the wiseacres I could get together, and I have been considering their criticisms and suggestions, until now the details of my scheme are pretty nearly complete, and I sign the papers with my architect and builder to-night. You know about the plan for coöperative cooking which I used to discourse upon to you to your infinite amusement. Well, half of the people here opposed it at first just as you did. They said, for one thing, that no one under heaven would be able to provide the kind of food that would suit all tastes. There would be Jews who would want to have meat killed after their own fashion; the Italians would want horrid messes of garlic; the Irish would find fault if they didn’t have the finest white bread and the strongest of tea, and not a blessed one of them would eat oatmeal, the coarse cereals, nutritious soups, or any of the suitable things that they ought to eat. All of which is more or less true, as I had wit enough to know myself beforehand; but I don’t mean to let it daunt me. I shall let all my tenants have an Atkinson kerosene stove in their rooms, if they wish to pay for it, and on this they can do an endless amount of cooking at a trifling cost for fuel, and a great saving of space as well as of heat in summer. I have engaged one of the graduates of Mrs. Lincoln’s cooking school to take my first kitchen in charge. Meantime, until the buildings are ready, I am going to send her to study the system of marketing and cooking for hotels; also the kinds of food which each nationality likes, and the methods of its preparation.