so home
to supper and to bed.

18th. Up, and after being ready and done several businesses with people,
I took water (taking a dram of the bottle at the waterside) with a
gaily, the first that ever I had yet, and down to Woolwich, calling at
Ham Creeke, where I met Mr. Deane, and had a great deal of talke with
him about business, and so to the Ropeyarde and Docke, discoursing
several things, and so back again and did the like at Deptford, and I
find that it is absolutely necessary for me to do thus once a weeke at
least all the yeare round, which will do me great good, and so home with
great ease and content, especially out of the content which I met with
in a book I bought yesterday, being a discourse of the state of Rome
under the present Pope, Alexander the 7th, it being a very excellent
piece. After eating something at home, then to my office, where till
night about business to dispatch. Among other people came Mr. Primate,
the leather seller, in Fleete Streete, to see me, he says, coming this
way; and he tells me that he is upon a proposal to the King, whereby,
by a law already in being, he will supply the King, without wrong to
any man, or charge to the people in general, so much as it is now, above
L200,000 per annum, and God knows what, and that the King do like
the proposal, and hath directed that the Duke of Monmouth, with their
consent, be made privy, and go along with him and his fellow proposer in
the business, God knows what it is; for I neither can guess nor believe
there is any such thing in his head. At night made an end of the
discourse I read this morning, and so home to supper and to bed.

19th. Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and I laboured
hard at Deering's business of his deals more than I would if I did not
think to get something, though I do really believe that I did what is
to the King's advantage in it, and yet, God knows, the expectation of
profit will have its force and make a man the more earnest. Dined at
home, and then with Mr. Bland to another meeting upon his arbitration,
and seeing we were likely to do no good I even put them upon it, and
they chose Sir W. Rider alone to end the matter, and so I am rid of it.
Thence by coach to my shoemaker's and paid all there, and gave something
to the boys' box against Christmas. To Mrs. Turner's, whom I find busy
with Sir W. Turner, about advising upon going down to Norfolke with the
corps, and I find him in talke a sober, cons