CAMBRIDGE 37 
marriage, his son, Alexander, a boy thirteen years of age, 
had joined him, and in the autumn of 1850 his two 
daughters, Ida and Pauline, both some years younger than 
their brother, came to America. Thus the family in Oxford 
Street was made complete. 
The relation between Mrs. Agassiz and her step-children 
was most unusual and singularly happy. Her judicious 
tenderness won their affection, and her devotion to them 
and theirs to her in sickness and in health until death 
parted them knew scarcely a shade of difference to that 
existing between a mother and her own children. “She 
showed us and taught us, just by being herself, only good 
and lovely things,” one of them wrote of her many years 
afterward. Close and enduring as was the tie soon formed 
between Mrs. Agassiz and her little step-daughters, the 
intimacy which speedily developed between Alexander 
and herself was still more remarkable. He had come to 
America less than a year after the death of his own mother, 
who had been his adored companion and the object of his 
tender devotion during her final illness, when he had as- 
sumed the care of the household. Quiet and thoughtful 
beyond his years, with his mother’s place forlornly empty, 
speaking only French and German, he offered in his boyish 
heart ready soil for the flower of affection that sprang up 
at his first sight of his father’s future wife, and that never 
ceased to blossom. She remained, as he said at her death, 
for sixty years his mother, guide and friend. How closely 
their lives became entwined will in a measure be seen 
in later chapters, but has best been expressed by Alex- 
ander himself in a letter written shortly after his step- 
mother’s death and published in his biography by his son 
