48 two in the morning Thursday. Wednes- da} is market day. The boat, which is called Manuia (it means Good Luck), is full of cattle, pigs, people, and fur- niture. Our house doesn't really belong to us. W e gave the money to build It to a native family; they move out when we come. We spent three months there last winter It's a real old-tIme bamboo house, with rounded ends, kerosene lamps, and a kerosene icebox. We go snorkeling and fishing on the reef. We've done some digging on the island, for adzes, fishhooks, and ivory pendants. The people are wonderfully perceptive. The things they express are hunger, love, vanity, and fear. The) love to gossip. " The Dodds have a hilly farm in Putney, where they keep horses, cows, sheep, pigs, ducks, and geese. Mr. Dodd has conducted natural-history courses from time to time at the Putney School, and he has arranged for the school to give scholarships to several Tongan boys and girls. "One went on to Har- vard, where he majored in anthropol- ogy and graduated cum laude," he said. "He then went to Cambridge, in Eng- land, and later took a Ph.D. in New Zealand He's now a Minister without Portfolio in Tonga " Prospect Park P ROSPECT PARK, in Brooklyn, has been quietly moldering away, like an ancient and decaying noblewoman, for more than thIrty years now-ever since the Department of Parks cut back its maintenance budget, in 1934-though Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed both Central Park and Prospect Park, regarded Prospect Park as their masterpiece. Most Brook- lynites agree that Central Park was little more than scratch paper for designing the great work that followed. As for us, we know that Central Park is second to none, but we grudgIngly agreed to take a walk through Prospect Park with its curator, Clay Lancaster, on the as- surance that anyone who liked Central Park would like Prospect Park, too. We were an the more interested be- cause August Heckscher, the Commis- sioner of Parks, had recently announced plans to renovate Prospect Park-par- ticularly the elegant white Boathouse, with its rows of arches; the jungly glen known as the Vale of Cashmere; and the turreted, I talianate Litchfield Villa, on the western harder of the park. On a sunny fall day a week ago, when the trees in Brooklyn were be- ginning to turn, we found Mr Lancas- ter waiting for us under the arch at Grand Army Plaza. He asked us chau- vinIstically if we knew that we were standing in the midst of the greatest complex of architecture anywhere in the world designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. The Brook- lyn Museum and the administration building for the Brooklyn Botanic Gar- den, both nearby, were the work of the firm, he explained, and so were five of the entrances to the park. OCTOßER 2, 8 t 1 9 b 7 "There is nothing by McKim, Mead & White in Central Park," Mr. Lan- caster said. The main entrance to the park, op- posIte the arch, has four soaring col- umns, two of which are by McKIm, Mead & White. Mr. Lancaster, who is a long-legged, gray-haired man in his late forties, set off between the columns at a brisk clip. As the two of us wound along a crooked little path, he supplied some of the park's vital statistics. It was built between 1 66 and 1 72, and contains five hundred and twenty-six acres, as against the eight hundred and forty of Central Park. We were not to be deceived by these figures, Mr. Lancaster said sternly. Though smaller than Central Park, Prospect Park IS bUIlt on a grander scale. Olmsted and Vaux had learned from their mistakes in Manhattan. The biggest error-not .of their doing-was the crosstown transverses in Central Park, which broke up the rhythlTI of the Park's land- scaping into restricted units. There are no transverse rOdds in Prospect Park. Instead, its Long Meadow sweeps on for seventy-five unbroken acres-five times the size of any meadow in Cen- tral Park-and the Lake in Prospect Park is two and a half times the size of the Lake in Central Park. We came shortly to an arched hridge, the Endale Arch, which is reminiscent of some of the Central Park bridges. From time to time on our walk, we had this sense of déjà-vu again, for many places echo spots in Central Park. Through the arch, as through a keyhole in a barn door, the Long Meadow curved invitingly into the distance. We marched up the mead- ow a way, and then Mr. Lancaster turned down a path to what is left of the Rose Garden and the Vale of Cash- mere. In the Rose Garden, three empty circles on the ground marked the sites of pools. Victoria lilies large enough for a child to sit on had been grown there, Mr. Lancaster said as he led the way down a narrow defile to the Vale of Cashmere. The Vale is overgrown with weeds, but they have not entirely erased what Mr. Lancaster called its original j ungly feeling. We climbed along a pitted path and then walked along the circular roadway that runs just inside Prospect Park. Olmsted and Vaux had designed this road, like the one inside Central Park, with as many curves as possible, so that the equestrian hot-rodders of those days couldn't race along at breakneck speed. Now workmen were straightening and widening the road. We soon stopped at the Prospect Park Zoo, where there