282 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
There were two visits that Mrs. Agassiz definitely 
planned to make for her own gratification in the course of 
her travels, one to Montagny where the Swiss relatives of 
Agassiz were still living, and the other to the colleges for 
women in Cambridge and Oxford. It is significant of her 
interests that her only two personal desires for her year 
abroad were connected, one with the great affection of her 
life, the other with her faithfully accepted public responsi- 
bility. For the rest of- her travels she expressed no individ- 
ual plans or preferences, in spite of the fact that she had 
previously seen almost nothing of Europe. “I do not in- 
cline to make plans,” she wrote, “rather to confine my out- 
look to shorter intervals — as Sydney Smith has said, ‘not 
farther than from dinner to tea.’” 
A few extracts from letters written during this year 
abroad are given here, which reflect in one way or another 
traits and interests which were an inherent part of Mrs. 
Agassiz’s true self — her delight in music, her pleasure in 
friends connected with her past, as, for example, in meet- 
ing Francesca Alexander and her mother in Florence, and 
in London Lady Harcourt, who as Miss Lily Motley had 
been a pupil at the Agassiz school, her love for Nahant 
that called as loudly in Venice as in Cambridge, and her 
devotion to Agassiz that made every scene connected with 
his early years sacred. 
TO MISS SARAH G. CARY 
Hétel Meurice, Paris, October 29, 1894 
Our days are arranged somewhat after this fashion. 
Breakfast independent, or we each order it, as we 
come out of our rooms — of course the French break- 
