30 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



his attention to the fact that the man was waiting on 

 them. Agassiz remarked that he was not speaking to 

 him ; the officer handed Agassiz his card ; the latter tore 

 it up ; the officer started to draw his sword, but, before 

 he could get it out of the scabbard, Agassiz knocked 

 him down with a chair. In the confusion which fol- 

 lowed, he jumped into a cab, drove to the embassy, and 

 stated his case. The upshot of the matter was that the 

 officer was forced to apologize. 



Sometimes his anger warped his judgment, a weak- 

 ness of which he was not unconscious. For after writing 

 a letter in a moment of excitement, it was often his 

 habit to keep it till the next day, and then destroy it. 

 Occasionally his indignation was not wholly reasonable, 

 but it took such whimsical turns that it endeared him 

 the more to his friends. One day at Newport he was 

 looking over some charts with one of his sons and dis- 

 cussing his next trip. It so happened that the latter had 

 not been in Newport for several years. Suddenly Agas- 

 siz looked up and beheld in the distance a buggy tied 

 to a tree, and a couple of men fishing on the rocks. 



" There," said Agassiz, " they are at it again ! The 

 way everybody drives all over the place and ties his 

 horses everywhere is perfectly outrageous. The worst 

 of it is that when they are spoken to, they are so inso- 

 lent ! " 



With that he stalked off toward them, and was well 

 across the lawn before the thought that he might need 

 protection from the insolence of these intruders oc- 

 curred to his son. When he finally came to his father's 

 aid, he found him upbraiding the trespassers for their 

 iniquities in plain Anglo-Saxon. These unfortunates, 

 whenever they could get a word in edgewise, endeavored 



