scallop which she herself told me of. At last we pretty good friends,
and my wife begun to speak again of the necessity of her keeping
somebody to bear her company; for her familiarity with her other
servants is it that spoils them all, and other company she hath none,
which is too true, and called for Jane to reach her out of her trunk,
giving her the keys to that purpose, a bundle of papers, and pulls out
a paper, a copy of what, a pretty while since, she had wrote in a
discontent to me, which I would not read, but burnt. She now read it,
and it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the
retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in
English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was
vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it. When she
desired to be excused it, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal
took her other bundle of papers from her, and leapt out of the bed and
in my shirt clapped them into the pocket of my breeches, that she might
not get them from me, and having got on my stockings and breeches and
gown, I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face,
though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not
to do it, but such was my passion and trouble to see the letters of
my love to her, and my Will wherein I had given her all I have in the
world, when I went to sea with my Lord Sandwich, to be joyned with a
paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been
found by any body. Having torn them all, saving a bond of my uncle
Robert's, which she hath long had in her hands, and our marriage
license, and the first letter that ever I sent her when I was her
servant,

[The usual word at this time for a lover. We have continued the
correlative term "mistress," but rejected that of "servant."]

I took up the pieces and carried them into my chamber, and there, after
many disputes with myself whether I should burn them or no, and having
picked up, the pieces of the paper she read to-day, and of my Will which
I tore, I burnt all the rest, and so went out to my office troubled
in mind. Hither comes Major Tolhurst, one of my old acquaintance in
Cromwell's time, and sometimes of our clubb, to see me, and I could do
no less than carry him to the Mitre, and having sent for Mr. Beane, a
merchant, a neighbour of mine, we sat and talked, Tolhurst telling me
the manner