which were Forman's, being kinsman and heir unto Dr. Napper. (His son
Thomas Napper, Esq.; most generously gave most of these manuscripts to
Elias Ashmole, Esq.;) I hope you will pardon this digression.

After my mistress was dead, I lived most comfortably, my master having a
great affection for me.

The year 1625 now comes on, and the plague exceeding violent, I will
relate what I observed the spring before it broke forth. Against our
corner house every night there would come down, about five or six of the
clock, sometime one hundred or more boys, some playing, others as if in
serious discourse, and just as it grew dark would all be gone home; many
succeeding years there was no such, or any concourse, usually no more
than four or five in a company: In the spring of 1625, the boys and
youths of several parishes in like number appeared again, which I
beholding, called Thomas Sanders, my landlord, and told him, that the
youth and young boys of several parishes did in that nature assemble and
play, in the beginning of the year 1625. 'God bless us,' quoth I, 'from
a plague this year;' but then there succeeded one, and the greatest that
ever was in London. In 1625, the visitation encreasing, and my master
having a great charge of money and plate, some of his own, some other
men's, left me and a fellow-servant to keep the house, and himself in
June went into Leicestershire. He was in that year feoffee collector for
twelve poor alms-people living in Clement-Dane's Church-Yard; whose
pensions I in his absence paid weekly, to his and the parish's great
satisfaction. My master was no sooner gone down, but I bought a
bass-viol, and got a master to instruct me; the intervals of time I
spent in bowling in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, with Wat the cobler, Dick the
blacksmith, and such like companions: We have sometimes been at our work
at six in the morning, and so continued till three or four in the