and is the first and only piece of good news,
or thing fit to be owned, that this nation hath done several years.
After dinner I to the office, and they gone, anon comes Pelling, and he
and I to Gray's Inne Fields, thinking to have heard Mrs. Knight sing at
her lodgings, by a friend's means of his;

[Mrs. Knight, a celebrated singer and mistress of Charles II. There
is in Waller's "Poems" a song sung by her to the queen on her
birthday. In her portrait, engraved by Faber, after Kneller, she is
represented in mourning, and in a devout posture before a crucifix.
Evelyn refers to her singing as incomparable, and adds that she had
"the greatest reach of any English woman; she had been lately
roaming in Italy, and was much improv'd in that quality" ("Diary,"
December 2nd, 1674).]

but we come too late; so must try another time. So lost our labour, and
I by coach home, and there to my chamber, and did a great deal of good
business about my Tangier accounts, and so with pleasure discoursing
with my wife of our journey shortly to Brampton, and of this little
girle, which indeed runs in my head, and pleases me mightily, though I
dare not own it, and so to supper and to bed.

28th. Up, having slept not so much to-night as I used to do, for my
thoughts being so full of this pretty little girle that is coming to
live with us, which pleases me mightily. All the morning at the Office,
busy upon an Order of Council, wherein they are mightily at a loss what
to advise about our discharging of seamen by ticket, there being no
money to pay their wages before January, only there is money to pay
them since January, provided by the Parliament, which will be a horrid
disgrace to the King and Crowne of England that no man shall reckon
himself safe, but where the Parliament takes care. And this did move Mr.
Wren at the table to-day to say, that he did believe if ever there be
occasion more to raise money, it will become here, as it is in Poland,
that there are two treasurers--one for the King, and the other for the
kingdom. At noon dined at home, and Mr. Hater with me, and Mr. Pierce,
the surgeon, dropped in, who I feared did come to bespeak me to be
godfather to his son, which I am unwilling now to be, having ended my
liking to his wife, since I find she paints. After dinner comes Sir Fr.
Hollis to me about business; and I with him by coach to the Temple, and
there I 'light; all the way he telling me