for making pastries
and marchpanes, possets and sugared tankards, and confeeding of
diapasms, pomanders, and other sweet essences, and cures for the
chilblains; and like her she plays excellent well on the harpsichords.

Thus, in a quiet comfort and competence, in the love of my children, and
in the King's peace, these my latter days are gliding away. I am
somewhat troubled with gout and twitching pains, scotomies in the head,
and fulness of humours, with other old men's ailments; and I do not
sleep well o' nights owing to vexatious Dreams and Visions, to abate
which I am sometimes let blood, and sometimes blistered behind the ears;
but beyond these cares--and who hath not his cares?--Captain John
Dangerous, of number One hundred Hanover Square, is a Happy Man.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] 1780.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

THE HISTORY OF AN UNKNOWN LADY, WHO CAME FROM DOVER IN A COACH-AND-SIX.

IN the winter of the year 1720, died in her house in Hanover
Square,--the very one in which I am now finishing my life,--an Unknown
Lady nearly ninety years of age. The mansion was presumed to be her own,
and it was as much hers as it is mine now; but the reputed landlord was
one Doctor Vigors, a physician of the College in Warwick Lane, in whose
name the Lease ran, who was duly rated to the poor as tenant, and whose
patient the Unknown Lady was given out to be. But when Dr. Vigors came
to Hanover Square it was not as a Master, but as the humblest of
Servants; and no tradesman, constable, maid, or lacquey about the house
or neighbourhood would have ventured for his or her life to question
that, from cellar to roof, every inch of the mansion belonged to the
Unknown Lady. The vulgar held her in a kind of Awe, and spoke of her as
the Lady in Diamonds; for she always wore a number of those precious
gems, in rings, bracelets, stomachers, and the like. The gentlefolks, of
whom many waited upon her, from her first coming hither unto her death,
asked for "my Lady," and nothing more. It was in the year 1714 that she
first arrived in London, coming late at night from Dover, in a
coach-and-six, and bringing with her one Mr. Cadwallader, a person of a
spare habit and great gravity of countenance, as her steward; one
Mistress Nancy Talmash, as her waiting-woman; and a Foreign Person of a
dark and forbidding mien, who was said to be her chaplain. In the
following year, and during the unhappy troubles in Scotland arising out
of the treasons of the