. . .Since your father wrote you on the 4th of June, dear Louis, we
have had no news from you, and therefore infer that you are working
with especial zeal to wind up your affairs in Germany and come home
as soon as possible. Whatever haste you make, however, you will not
find us here. Four days ago your father became pastor of Concise,
and yesterday we went to visit our new home. Nothing can be
prettier, and by all who know the place it is considered the most
desirable position in the canton. There is a vineyard, a fine
orchard filled with fruit-trees in full bearing, and an excellent
kitchen garden. A never-failing spring gushes from a grotto, and
within fifty steps of the house is a pretty winding stream with a
walk along the bank, bordered by shrubbery, and furnished here and
there with benches, the whole disposed with much care and taste.
The house also is very well arranged. All the rooms look out upon
the lake, lying hardly a gunshot from the windows. There are a
parlor and a dining-room on the first floor, beside two smaller
rooms; and on the same floor two doors lead out into the flower
garden. The kitchen is small, and on one side is a pretty ground
where we can dine in the open air in summer. The distribution of
rooms in the upper story is the same, with a large additional room
for the accommodation of your father's catechumens. A jasmine vine
drapes the front of the house and climbs to the very roof. . .
To this quiet pretty parsonage Madame Agassiz became much attached.
Her tranquil life is well described in a letter written many years
afterward by one of her daughters. "Here mama returned to her
spinning-wheel with new ardor. It was a work she much liked, and in
which she was very skillful. In former times at grandpapa's every
woman in the house, whether mistress or maid, had her wheel, and
the young ladies were accustomed to spin and make up their own
trousseaus. Later, mama continued her spinning for her children,
and even for her grandchildren. We all preserve as a precious
souvenir, table linen of her making. We delighted to see her at her
wheel, she was so graceful, and the thread of her thought seemed to
follow, so to speak, the fine and delicate thread of her work as it
unwound itself under her touch from the distaff."
Agassiz was detained by his publishing arrangements and his work
longer than he had expected, and November was already advanced
before his preparations for leaving Munich were completed.
TO HIS PARENTS.
MUNICH, November 9, 1830.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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