CHAPTER XI 

 EUROPE 



1894-1895 



DURING the fifteen years while the Annex was de- 

 veloping into Radcliffe College Mrs. Agassiz's mani- 

 fold official duties did not by any means engross her entire 

 time or form the most intimate claims on her attention. 

 The conditions of her daily existence that we have seen 

 prevailing between 1873 and 1879 essentially continued 

 in this later period, accompanied by changes that time 

 made in the lives of her grandchildren, who as they grew 

 older did not grow any the less absorbing, and that illness 

 and death brought into the family circle. Of these the most 

 important to Mrs. Agassiz was the death of her mother in 

 1880. "Life is so different," she wrote to Frau Mettenius 

 a few months later, "when we have no longer father or 

 mother in the world. We are at first (however old we may 

 be when the change comes) a little like lost children." Yet 

 on the whole these years of which we are speaking, apart 

 from Mrs. Agassiz's efforts for the college, contain little to 

 record beyond the round of activities that were incident to 

 a large social and family connection such as hers. 



It was during this time that she became a member of the 

 Ladies' Visiting Committee for the Kindergarten for the 

 Blind, established under the direction of the Perkins Insti- 

 tution for the Blind, and began her service as treasurer for 

 the Cambridge branch of the committee, which she contin- 

 ued for seventeen years, until after an illness in 1904 she 



