172 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
understanding that he had received from her ever since she 
had first entered his own boyhood and for the care that he 
desired for his children. Some few months earlier he had 
come with his family temporarily to his father’s house, ex- 
pecting tq pass the winter in Nassau. On the death of his 
wife he at once took the house in Quincy Street for his own 
residence, and there Mrs. Agassiz had her home for the rest 
of her life, his companion, the presiding genius of his house- 
hold, and the mother of his three boys, George, Maximilian, 
and Rodolphe. To the youngest, Rodolphe, she literally 
took the place of a mother, and she brought him up as if he 
had been her own child. A year later Alexander Agassiz 
began to build a house at Newport, Rhode Island, and 
after 1875, the family used to separate for the summer, 
Mrs. Agassiz going as usual to Nahant and the rest of the 
household to Newport. Thus while the outer setting of her 
days remained unaltered, with the close of 1873 a wholly 
new epoch in her occupations, her cares, and her habits 
began. 
Under these conditions her exceptional qualities did not 
fail her. “She was so constructed,” Mrs. Curtis writes, 
“that she could really accept her own sorrow with more 
fortitude than that which came to her children; and I re- 
member a sentence in a letter that I received from Sallie 
. when we went abroad two years after all this, in which she 
says, ‘I do so miss Lizzie’s happiness.’” There is a notice- 
able entry in Mrs. Agassiz’s diary thirty years later: — 
“December 14, 1903. The anniversary of Agassiz’s death 
—and Annie’s the week after. How that month, Decem- 
ber, 1873, changed life for us all! Mimi sent me wonderful 
roses and mignonette; she is always so kind and thought- 
