A brilliant dinner followed at Mr. Field's, and simple withal, for such creative minds sought with avidity the Berkshire hills because "the comparatively small society was noted for its simple mode of living, for its intelligence, and its culture. " Fanny Kemble from " on top " of Lenox Hill describes to Mrs. Jameson the good old times: " You know the sort of life is lived here: the absence of form, ceremony, or inconvenient conventionality whatever; we laugh and we talk, sing, play, dance, and discuss; we ride, drive, walk, run, scramble, and saunter, and amuse ourselves extremely with little materials. " The frolicsome winter party is not entirely a thing of the past. How the Sedgwick homestead has rung with merry shouts of old and young playing together in hide-and-seek from garret to cellar. Those were incomparable winter evenings of fun with the beloved host and hostess Mr. and Mrs. Charles Sedgwick, who delighted in the informal hospitality traditional in the Sedgwick family.

Hawthorne's final note on this memorable August 4, 1850, reads: " afternoon, under the guidance of J. T. Headley, the party scrambled through the Ice-Glen. " A lively and weird scramble indeed. If Ice-Glen and Laurel Hill had kept a sentimental guest-book, then ingenious visitors might have left us a legacy of individual impressions of this most curious fissure in all Berkshire, lying concealed between Bear and Little Mountain. Veritable moss castles of gnomes and elves seem the tumbled boulders in the twilight of the gorge: all too sunless here for lovers' tryst- not even golden Queen Summer succeeds in erasing the chill of his majesty the Frost-King's footsteps, yet by her ,commands beautiful fern-clusters line the yawning black rock caverns.

"Away to the Ice-Glen,
The night dews are falling,"

calls blithe Fanny Kemble, and inaugurates the Stockbridge custom of startling the dryads of Ice-Glen once a year by a gay invasion of humans in fantastic masquerade with ghostly torch. The first torch-light party was arranged by Dr. S. P. Parker for the amusement of his pupils. Dr. Parker was the first rector of St. Paul's, Stockbridge's beautiful Church of memorials, founded at the house of Dr. Caleb Hyde, now Laurel Cottage. [1]

At Laurel Cottage David Dudley Field entertained Hawthorne and other distinguished people visiting Stockbridge that day, a hospitality which he continued later in that house on The Hill. His daughter Lady Musgrave of London sold Laurel Cottage, only on condition that two trees planted by Matthew Arnold during his residence should never be cut down. The acacia was brought from tree on the grave of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1886.

Matthew Arnold was at first very much put out with the mate of Berkshire, finding it first too hot, then excessively cold; but after his return to his beloved English hedgerows and nightingales he writes to his daughter: " You cannot think how often Stockbridge and its landscape come to my mind. None of the cities could attach me, not even Boston, but I could get fond of Stockbridge. "
From Laurel Cottage Arnold wrote to Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff:

" What would I give to go in your company for even one mile on any of the roads out of Stockbridge! The trees, too, delight me. I had no notion what maples really were. " Again to his sister from Stockbridge: " I see at last what the American autumn which they so praise is. . . . Day after day perfectly fine. I wish you could have been with us yesterday, that is, if you are not nervous in a carriage, for the . . . hills are awful. But the horses are the best tempered and, cleverest in the world; the drivers understand them perfectly. . . . We were perpetually stopping the carriage in the woods . . . the flowers are so attractive. . . . You have no notion how beautiful the asters are till you see them; I remember the great purple one (A. patens, I think) grows wild about Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight. There is a nice youth here, a German called Hoffman, who is an enthusiastic botanist. [2]