CHAPTER XI 
EUROPE 
1894-1895 
URING the fifteen years while the Annex was de- 
veloping into Radcliffe College Mrs. Agassiz’s mani- 
fold official duties did not by any means engross her entire 
time or form the most intimate claims on her attention. 
The conditions of her daily existence that we have seen 
prevailing between 1873 and 1879 essentially continued 
in this later period, accompanied by changes that time 
made in the lives of her grandchildren, who as they grew 
older did not grow any the less absorbing, and that illness 
and death brought into the family circle. Of these the most 
important to Mrs. Agassiz was the death of her mother in 
1880. “Life is so different,” she wrote to Frau Mettenius 
a few months later, ““when we have no longer father or 
mother in the world. We are at first (however old we may 
be when the change comes) a little like lost children.” Yet 
on the whole these years of which we are speaking, apart 
from Mrs. Agassiz’s efforts for the college, contain little to 
record beyond the round of activities that were incident to 
a large social and family connection such as hers. 
It was during this time that she became a member of the 
Ladies’ Visiting Committee for the Kindergarten for the 
Blind, established under the direction of the Perkins Insti- 
tution for the Blind, and began her service as treasurer for 
the Cambridge branch of the committee, which she contin- 
ued for seventeen years, until after an illness in 1904 she 
