Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907

[30] so beset him in his translating as to turn his task into the most irresistible of pleasures, did not seem so forlorn a hope, or an investment so very unpromising, and under the encouragement of his generous and well-to-do brother-in-law, who was ready to help him financially, he ventured upon the undertaking,—doing editorial work for other anti-slavery papers in the meanwhile, and importing for his fables the expensive and speaking illustrations of Grandville. While the publication was in process, his brother-in-law failed, and the cost became wholly Mr. Wright's. His earnings were hardly enough for home needs, and there was nothing to do but to take his book from door to door. He did this, going from city to city, first in his own country, and then in England and Scotland. It took three hard, desperate, courageous years, but every copy of the edition was at last sold, and his debts paid,; not wholly from the proceeds of his sales, but from them and later earnings.

It was while pushing this cruelly slow work in London that Mr. Wright first realized the great necessity of parks to crowded and growing cities. In England he kept sharp watch on all from which he could get knowledge or inspiration.

Mr. Wright's discovery of the Fells was not till 1864, when he came to live in Medford, and until 1880 his time was still pressed with other important work, but he did not forget the city's need of a park. In Medford, with his home on Pine Hill, and from its top rock a glimpse of the city and ocean, and on all other sides rocks, dells, hills, and the almost unbroken woods, another site, nearer Boston, richer and more varied in its wild pictures, and with a larger promise of a future forest, had revealed itself in the :‘Old Five Mile Woods,’ or Middlesex Fells. Loving nature and humanity, and knowing the interdependence of each with each, it is little wonder Mr. Wright should very soon have made himself master of the extent land resources of this great waste and wasted region, or that he should have seen in it the grandest possible future park for Boston, or later should have made its cause his own.

Had the Fells been taken in the Way he urged, we should have had under a wholly unitary control its entire natural