Finally, there were balls: balls in the schoolroom under Miss Pierce’s own patronage, the invitations to attend them being highly prized by the law students, and balls given at the tavern or public house kept by Josiah Parks, on the top floor of the United States Hotel. These latter were larger. Those at the school were called balls; but Miss Pierce’s grandniece reports their being simple, early dances rather than real balls. “In 1798 a ball with the customary entertainment and variety of music, cost about $160,[20] and nothing was said about it,” showing that there had been a material change in the conditions and prosperity of the town since the earlier days when a dollar to be paid to a man with a fiddle to play for dancing was all the necessary cost of an evening’s entertainment. On Plate VI is a facsimile of an invitation to an election ball in Hartford. There was quite an elaborate system of merit marks at the school, and many a mark was won by the tiny stitches sewed on a dainty seam of some muslin gown, for according to the fashion of the day, woman’s attire could hardly be too delicate. There were no tailor-made gowns then. Even in winter muslin dresses and slippers were worn. “‘In 1794,’[21] to use Carlyle’s words, ‘every man began to ponder whether he should not even dress himself like the Free Peoples of Antiquity.’ Carlyle, of course, was speaking of French men and women; but the fashions adopted by them soon spread to England, though English women never pushed the classical craze so far as the French did.