Mrs. Whistler would have preferred to stay at Stonington, but for her two sons' sake she went to Pomfret, Connecticut, where there was a good school, Christ Church Hall. The principal was Rev. Dr. Roswell Park, a West Point engineer before he became parson and school teacher. At Pomfret Mrs. Whistler made herself a home. She could only afford part of an old farmhouse, and she felt keenly the discomfort for her boys. Yet she kept up the old discipline. On Christmas Day she wrote to her mother that they had been busy all morning bringing in wood and listing draughty doors, though she allowed them to lighten their task by hanging up evergreens and to sweeten it with "Stuart's Candy." After a snowstorm, they had, like other boys, to shovel paths, and all the while they had to study. "Jimmie was still an excitable spirit with little perseverance," she wrote; however, she would not faint but labour, and "I urged them on daily, and could see already their exertions to overcome habits of indolence." The Bible was read and the two boys were made to recite a verse every morning before breakfast. Miss Palmer, their schoolmate, during the winter of 1850, remembers that Mrs. Whistler "was very strict with them," and describes Whistler at this period as "tall and slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls, one lock of which fell over his forehead.... He had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, which, aided by his natural abilities, made him very charming even at that age.... He was one of the sweetest, loveliest boys I ever met, and was a great favourite." The deepest impression he left at Pomfret was as a draughtsman. He made caricatures and illustrations to the books he read, portraits of his friends, and landscapes. Many of his sketches have been preserved. The late Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, also one of his schoolmates, describes him as "a man as fascinating as he was great, with a charm which from the very beginning everyone who knew him recognised." Whistler told us that he used to walk to school with her, carrying her books and basket, and she wrote us: