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ORBE, July, 1830.

. . .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.