“Poganuc (Litchfield) in its summer dress was a beautiful place. Its main street had a row of dignified white houses, with deep dooryards and large side gardens, where the great scarlet peony flamed forth, where were generous tufts of white lilies, with tall spires of saintly blossoms, and yellow lilies with their faint sweet perfume, and all the good old orthodox flowers of stately family and valid pretensions. In all the dooryards and along the grassy streets on either side were over-shadowing, long-branching trees, forming a roof of verdure, a green upper world from whose recesses birds dropped down their songs in languages unknown to us mortals. Who shall interpret what is meant by the sweet jargon of robin and oriole and bobolink, with their endless reiterations? Something wiser, perhaps, than we dream in our lower life here.”[16] That there were amusements of some kind follows as a matter of course when there were so many young people in a place whose time was not all spent in study and whose high spirits must overflow now and then. In summer there were gay walks to Prospect Hill, where there was then, as later, an Echo Rock, and to Love’s Altar, a shady nook by the stream below the hill back of Governor Wolcott’s house. Both of these resorts were immortalized in color by Miss Mary Peck in her album.[17] Mr. Lord had built a bowling alley on the west side of the Prospect Hill road for the benefit of the pupils of both schools, so we can picture these walks combined with lively bowling matches, much like those of later days that were held in the old bowling alley, back of the United States Hotel. Then another set of young men and women met in bright summer days and passed many a merry hour minding no more a rise in the thermometer than ardent golfers do now. Then there were even gayer sleigh rides on crisp winter evenings, for Miss Pierce specifies in her rules for the school in 1825: “No young lady is allowed to attend any public ball or sleigh party till they are more than 16 years old.” A fine pine grove of which some of the trees still remain to mark the site, and which received the name of Pine Island, lay a mile or two directly south, and was a favorite picnic ground for the girls. Candy-making and candy-pulling by a big wood fire were great occasions, for does not Mr. Cutler draw with his pen a lively picture of such a party he attended? The scarcity of sugar in those days probably added great interest to the spring crop of maple sugar, and with snow still on the ground we can think of the frolics there must have been sometimes over big kettles of sap, which was taken out and cooled with snow to make a delicious candy. Possibly there may sometimes have been invitations to apple bees and corn husking just outside of the town. Then there were excursions to the Lake, for we read in the Litchfield Monitor for August, 1795: POND LILY.