MY DEAR RICHARD,—I have come to the conclusion that the immediate need is to get my will properly fixed up. If you won’t accept the responsibility of distributing money according to your own judgment I must make some definite bequests. I calculate that after relations and friends and certain dependants are provided for or remembered, there ought to be as much as £50,000 to leave for some specific useful purpose. It might go to build and endow alms-houses, it might form a benevolent fund of some kind. Please concentrate on this question, even though it tends towards that pernicious evil “interference.” I am in momentary fear of losing Miss Power because her mother has been ill; but hope for the best. I don’t know what we should do without her. V. CIII RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY Now, Verena, you’re talking. The interest on £50,000 at five per cent, with income-tax at present rate deducted, would be, say, £1750. Well, you can do lots of things with £1750 a year. Have you ever heard of the National Art Collections Fund? This is a society of amateurs of art who collect money in order to acquire for the nation pictures and drawings and sculptures which the nation ought not to miss but which it has no official means of purchasing. For although we have a National Gallery of the highest quality, the Treasury grant for buying new masterpieces for it is so small that, unless private enterprise assists, everything goes to America. How would you like your £1750 a year to assist the purchase of pictures for the nation—whether hung in London or elsewhere—for ever? And then have you ever heard of the National Trust for the Preservation of Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty? This was founded by the late Octavia Hill with the purpose of acquiring for the nation, for ever, beauty spots and open spaces and old comely buildings. Isn’t that a good and humane idea? To preserve a piece of grass land, with all its trees intact, in the midst of a new building estate! All kinds of parks and commons and hill-tops are now inviolate through the activities of this Society. Would you like your money to strengthen their hands? No one with money to spare who followed Octavia Hill could go wrong. That is enough for the present; but I will supply further hints.