THE LAST YEARS 391 
would be complete without a mention of the devoted com- 
panionship given her by her only remaining sisters, Mrs. 
Curtis and Miss Cary. Mrs. Curtis’s visits were her contin- 
ual delight both in anticipation and in retrospect, while 
Miss Cary’s music never lost its charm for her. “I long to 
see my Emma,” she writes from Arlington Heights in Sep- 
tember, 1906, “to hear her play Chopin, so full of passion 
and sweetness as his music is, with a touch all her own. 
Some one said one day on hearing her for the first time, ‘I 
have heard all the virtuosos who come to Boston, but here 
is something I do not recognize — a personal note which 
I hear for the first time.’ I know it well and long for it.” 
To the end of her life Mrs. Agassiz’s affections remained 
strong, and in the few following letters, found in draft 
among her papers and among the latest that she wrote, 
the note of friendship sounds as clear and sweet as an eve- 
ning bell. 
TO OWEN WISTER 
Arlington Heights, [June, 1906] 
Dear Owen: You will think I have neither read 
nor enjoyed your book [Lady Baltimore], and yet I 
have done both; but an invalid (especially one whose 
failure makes part of her eighty-three years) has to 
postpone many things. To tell the truth when the 
book was brought to me it recalled the time when you 
were just on the threshold of life, when you used to 
look in upon me sometimes in the evening, having the 
kindness to give me a lesson in Wagner — I was, and 
still am, a very poor scholar on that ground. The 
older music is to me the dearest. I remember the 
