It was a day of social novelties. Ice-cream as a refreshment first made its appearance in the country capital at the home of the widow of Alexander Hamilton. Introduced at the White House immediately afterwards by Jackson, it took society by storm,[99] and Kinchy, the confectioner on the Avenue, who had a monopoly on ice-cream and ices, became as indispensable socially as the chef and the fiddler.[100] Of the dances, the most popular was the waltz, introduced two years before Jackson’s inauguration, and, considered at first of questionable modesty, it soon won its way, and the matrons found it as alluring as the débutantes. Even then there were censorious people to see in the dreamy glide an example of the moral degeneracy of the age.[101] To accentuate their pessimism, the crowds were invariably so dense that the dancers could scarcely move, reminding an amused Kentuckian “of a Kentucky fight when the crowd draws the circle so close that the combatants have no room to use their limbs.” But despite the crowded quarters, the twenty-four fiddlers in a row bravely sought “by dint of loud music to put the amateurs in motion,” until they jumped “up and down in a hole, and nobody sees more of them than their heads.”[102] Queer, conglomerate crowds packed the balls and receptions of men in public life, forced to accept official society as they found it, and if members of Congress appeared at the dance in their morning habiliments and in unpolished boots, in worsted stockings and in garments fashioned by a backwoods tailor, they were not conspicuous.[103] All, or most, entered with zest into the social activities of the time. On the night of a big ball “the rolling of carriages sounded like continual peals of thunder, or roaring of the wind.” In the dark, dismal streets, the lamps on the vehicles alone were visible, and these, moving rapidly in the blackness, “appeared like brilliant meteors in the air.”[104] Sometimes, in the case of the more pretentious entertainers, like the foreign ministers, the streets in front of the houses were light as day from the line of flaming torches along the pavement. Fox, the British Minister, a relative of the great orator; Baron von Roenne, the Prussian, a brilliant jurist and publicist; and Baron Bodisco, the Russian, made great displays of equipages and appointments, and were noted for their wines and exotic entertainments. At the legations of Fox and Bodisco, great sums passed over the card table, the most famous statesmen of the time among the players, and the British Minister so seldom saw the sun that on the occasion of a funeral, while seated beside the wife of the Spanish Minister, he turned a puzzled look upon her with the comment, “How strange we all look by daylight!” Both ministers contributed not a little to the gayety of gossip, Bodisco, by his squat ugliness and courtliness, and Fox, by his whimsical refusal at dinners to go to the table until the dishes had cooled.[105] During the period the most