In Retrospect 289 



unworldly beauty and, here again, is one of the rare cases 

 when the words are worthy of the music. 



As I say, the details of one's personal religion are no- 

 body's business but one's own. However, I think it is only 

 fair to say, perfectly frankly, that I have got great com- 

 fort out of mine, and there have been occasions when, un- 

 supported by it, I should have been hard put to keep my 

 reason. 



My family have never mixed themselves very much into 

 my pursuits at the Museum. My daughter Julia worked 

 in the Agassiz Museum for a while in the Department of 

 Birds. She and her sister Louisa are talented executives, ac- 

 tive in the management of social and charitable agencies. 

 Besides this, Julia has a fine voice and draws beautifully, 

 if she would only believe it and keep practising. Perhaps 

 she will. My oldest daughter, Mary, happily married to 

 Alfred Kidder II, shares his archaeological interest in South 

 America. His calling brings him to deal with objects fre- 

 quently of rare beauty, and before her marriage Mary B. 

 worked in the Peabody Museum for some years as an ex- 

 pert pottery restorer. She is also a diarist of no mean talent. 

 When my old friend Ellery Sedgwick reviewed her last 

 book for the Atlajitic Monthly with spontaneous and gen- 

 erous praise I was, I think, even more happy than she. 



A catalogue of the friendships of any man is bound to be 

 a bore, like Homer's Catalogue of the Ships, but I cannot 

 refrain from mentioning a few of those whose names may 

 not have appeared in the pages which I have written. I 

 think first of Leonhard Stejneger, dux, lex, lux, who began 

 answering my tiresome questions when I was eighteen and 



