Tea was not only a beverage of courtship; it also was associated with marriage. Both Peter Kalm, in 1750, and Moreau de St. Méry, in the 1790's, report the Philadelphia custom of expressing good wishes to a newly married couple by paying them a personal visit soon after the marriage. It was the duty of the bride to serve wine and punch to the callers before noon and tea and wine in the afternoon.[28] No doubt, make-believe teatime and pretend tea drinking were a part of some children's playtime activities. Perhaps many a little girl played at serving tea and dreamed of having a tea party of her own, but few were as fortunate as young Peggy Livingston who, at about the age of five, was allowed to invite "by card ... 20 young misses" to her own "Tea Party & Ball." She "treated them with all good things, & a violin," wrote her grandfather. There were "5 coaches at y^e door at 10 when they departed. I was much amused 2 hours."[29] [Illustration: Figure 4.--_Conversazioni_, by W. H. Bunbury, published 1782. In Print and Photograph Division, Library of Congress.] Tea seems to have been the excuse for many a social gathering, large or small, formal or informal. And sometimes an invitation to drink tea meant a rather elegant party. "That is to say," wrote one cosmopolitan observer of the American scene in the 1780's, the Marquis de Chastellux, "to attend a sort of assembly pretty much like the _conversazioni_ [social gathering] of Italy; for tea here, is the substitute for the _rinfresco_ [refreshment]."[30] A view of such an event has been depicted in the English print _Conversazioni_ (fig. 4), published in 1782. It is hoped that the stiffly seated and solemn-faced guests became more talkative when the tea arrived. However, this tea party may have been like the ones Ferdinand Bayard attended in Bath, Virginia, of which he wrote: "The only thing you hear, while they are taking tea, is the whistling sound made by the lips on edges of the cups. This music is varied by the request made to you to have another cup."[31] At tea parties, cakes, cold pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, and plates of cracked nuts might also be served, according to Mrs. Anne Grant's reminiscences of pre-Revolutionary America.[32] Peter Kalm noted during his New York sojourn in 1749 that "when you paid a visit to any home" a bowl of cracked nuts and one of apples were "set before you, which you ate after drinking tea and even at times while partaking of tea."[33] Sometimes wine and punch were served at teatime, and "in summer," observed Barbé-Marbois, "they add fruit and other things to drink."[34] Coffee too might be served. As the Frenchman Claude Blanchard explained:[35]