TEMPLE PLACE 15 
given up and the enclosure became the Public Garden. 
Out towards Brookline stretched the Mill-Dam, and 
on the other side of the city “The Neck” led to Rox- 
bury and also was connected with South Boston by 
a bridge. The Neck and the Mill-Dam afforded space 
for long walks for the pedestrians of the time. People 
walked in those days and were the better for it. 
s Between the two divisions of Boston, the conserv- 
atives and the transcendentalists, Elizabeth Cary 
passed her youth and like a wholesome plant, drew 
the best from all these elements. 
The winter life in Temple Place passed under the con- 
ditions that Miss Cary has described was to a great extent 
continued for the Cary household during the summer, which 
they always spent at Nahant. Here they occupied a stone 
cottage built by Colonel Perkins not long after the mar- 
riage of Mrs. Cary and said to have been the first house in 
the place built by a Bostonian, for Nahant had not yet 
won the name of “cold roast Boston,” bestowed upon it 
later by a famous wag, and was little more than a 
resort for fishing and bathing parties. Here Mrs. Agassiz 
spent her summers with few exceptions from her earliest 
years until 1904, and Nahant never knew a rival in her af- 
fections. Her life there was gay and happy in her girlhood, 
for the cottage was overflowing with young people and 
echoing with their music and merriment. “How well I 
remember in our house at Nahant,” Miss Cary writes, “a 
line of young people tramping abreast round the broad 
piazza singing glees and catches and all sorts of ditties, 
their fresh young voices ringing out on the evening air. 
Or in our plain little parlor with nothing pretty in it but an 
