ANCESTRY 7 



in her cellar till she had nursed her back to sanity, and 

 tending the wounded, even British soldiers, during the 

 troublous times of the Revolution. 



Her son, Thomas Handasyd, the grandfather of Mrs. 

 Agassiz, married Sarah Elliot, the daughter of Simon and 

 Sarah Wilson Elliot of Boston, and brought a strain of 

 Scotch blood into the family through his wife's mother, 

 who was born in Scotland and had come to America in her 

 girlhood. She was as interesting for her lovable qualities as 

 Elizabeth Perkins was for her executive capacity, and her 

 house was long remembered by her grandchildren as the 

 scene of many youthful frolics in which their grandmother 

 was an active sympathizer. The marriage of Thomas 

 Perkins and the daughter of so excellent a mother fulfilled 

 its promises of happiness. In the sixty-three years of their 

 life together they were favored by fortune, and Colonel 

 Perkins, as he was always called after being appointed 

 lieutenant-colonel in the "Lancers," became one of the 

 influential and wealthy citizens of Boston, prominent for 

 the wise and philanthropic purposes for which he used his 

 means, especially as a generous contributor to the Boston 

 Athenaeum and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and 

 as the founder of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. 



His daughter, Mary, Mrs. Agassiz's mother, was there- 

 fore brought up amid more easy circumstances than her 

 husband, Thomas Gary, in a household where public local 

 interests and benefactions were of consequence, and under 

 the simple social conditions of early nineteenth-century 

 Boston. It is interesting to read of the impression that she 

 made upon her future brother-in-law, William Cary, during 

 a visit in Boston in 1818. He reports to Thomas, who was 



