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 Cary, 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 
