President Walker, Chief Justice Shaw, Judge G. T. Bigelow,
Rev. Dr. Putnam, Professors Agassiz and Longfellow, Messrs. David Sears, W.
Appleton, E. Rockwood Hoar, Jared Sparks, and J. A. Lowell dined here at four
o'clock. They had an agreeable meeting. Chief Justice Shaw took Mrs. Lawrence
in to dinner, though I asked Dr. Walker to do so; the former (who is
seventy-eight) being more active than Dr. Walker, who is lame. The dinner was
cooked by our own cook, Marion, and they all were cheerful and even gay; nor
did they leave the dining-room until they went away. Mr. Agassiz sat next to me
and talked all the time. I asked him whether some anecdotes about him in the
newspapers to-day were true, but he had not seen them. Then I repeated one
about his replying to a person who offered him a large sum for some lectures,
“that he was too busy to waste his time in making money;” and this he
pronounced to be true.
SOURCE: William Lawrence, Life of Amos A. Lawrence:
With Extracts from His Diary and Correspondence, p. 158-9
