talking gushingly for hours, “his face all the while, notwithstanding his gray hair, showing all the nobility and ingenuousness of a child’s.”[93] The talk about the firesides and at the receptions, that were given over entirely to conversation, was by no means confined to art, eloquence, and poetry, for the Mother Grundys of gossip were numerous among the women seeking to amuse and be amused. There were personalities as well as personages in the years that Jackson directed a triumphant party and Clay led a brilliant and militant opposition.[94] The little town of twenty thousand was not so large that the ladies could not know, from observation or deduction, when Adams dined with Calhoun, when Webster called on Mrs. Livingston, and what Mrs. Tayloe served her guests at her last reception. “Did you have candied oranges at Mrs. Woodbury’s?” asked a lady who had dined with Mrs. Cass, of a friend who had dined with the wife of the Secretary of the Navy. “No.” “Then they had candied oranges at the Attorney-General’s,” was the deduction. “How do you know?” “Oh, as we were on the way, I saw a dish carried; and as we had none at Cass’s, I knew they were either for the Woodburys or the Attorney-General’s.”[95] It was the golden age of gallantry as well as gossip, some flirtatious, some courtly. If the admirer of John Forsyth’s daughter proposed in a Valentine Day verse[96] throbbing with adolescent passion, the more staid and sober-minded Francis Scott Key wrote, in a fine hand, religious hymns for the pleasure of her mother.[97] The evening parties were the most popular form of entertainment, and the hostesses of the Cabinet circle set the pace. The invitations were sent out nine days in advance. Because of the exigencies of politics, and the exactions of an awakened “Democracy,” these could be neither small nor exclusive in character, and from seven to nine hundred invitations were usually extended. Between nine and ten o’clock all the apartments would be thrown open. The muddy streets in front would be congested with carriages. The host and hostess, standing in the drawing-room, would receive their guests, and then the more serious would withdraw to quiet corners for conversation, the gay and frivolous would swing into the dance, and the devotees of chance would seek and find a remote corner for cards. Servants would gingerly thread their way through the throng with light refreshments until eleven o’clock when an elaborate supper would be served. By three o’clock the company would begin to retire, and usually, at daybreak, the lights would be extinguished.[98]