10 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
Temple Place, known as “the Court,” presented condi- 
tions altogether typical of the Boston of that period. On the 
opposite side of the street from the Cary dwelling two other 
married daughters of Colonel Perkins lived, Mrs. William 
H. Gardiner and Mrs. Samuel Cabot. “Grandchildren in 
Temple Place were commonplace facts,” Mrs. Agassiz’s 
sister, Mrs. Charles P. Curtis, says in her Memories, a fam- 
ily manuscript from which there will be frequent occasion 
to quote below. There were twenty-one all told, eight 
Cabots, six Gardiners and seven Carys — Mary (Mrs. 
Cornelius Conway Felton), Elizabeth (Mrs. Louis Agas- 
siz), Thomas, Caroline (Mrs. Charles P. Curtis), Sarah, 
Emma and Richard. The Perkins connection, accord- 
ingly, may be said to have dominated the Court, and the 
constant intercourse and intimacy between the sisters and 
their children kept the family feeling strong and the tradi- 
tions unbroken. Such a gathering of a clan into a single 
limited district was in complete accordance with the Boston 
custom of those days, when families had the habit of con- 
gregating in one street and not only claimed it as their own, 
but also looked somewhat askance upon the unblest world 
without. “I dare say they are wrong; they do not live in 
Temple Place,” Mr. Cary used to remark with a little 
twinkle in his eye, when the opinions of outsiders were 
called into question by his daughters. A picture of the 
family environment in Temple Place has been left by 
Miss Emma Cary among the papers mentioned in the 
Preface. 
The house of our grandfather in Temple Place was 
an attractive house in the solid style of that day with 
a heavy stone portico and stone steps leading up to 
