be hard to get her home to-night, and a great charge to keep her longer
abroad, I took the opportunity of an empty coach that was to go to London,
and left her to come in it to London, for half-a-crown, and so I and the
boy home as fast as we could drive, and it was even night before we got
home. So that I account it very good fortune that we took this course,
being myself very weary, much more would my wife have been. At home found
all very well and my house in good order. To see Sir W. Pen, who is
pretty well, and Sir J. Minnes, who is a little lame on one foot, and the
rest gone to Chatham, viz.: Sir G. Carteret and Sir W. Batten, who has in
my absence inveighed against my contract the other day for Warren's masts,
in which he is a knave, and I shall find matter of tryumph, but it vexes
me a little. So home, and by and by comes my wife by coach well home, and
having got a good fowl ready for supper against her coming, we eat
heartily, and so with great content and ease to our own bed, there nothing
appearing so to our content as to be at our own home, after being abroad
awhile.

22nd. I up, well refreshed after my journey, and to my office and there
set some things in order, and then Sir W. Pen and I met and held an
office, and at noon to dinner, and so by water with my wife to
Westminster, she to see her father and mother, and we met again at my
Lord's lodgings, and thence by water home again, where at the door we met
Sir W. Pen and his daughter coming to visit us, and after their visit I to
my office, and after some discourse to my great satisfaction with Sir W.
Warren about our bargain of masts, I wrote my letters by the post, and so
home to supper and to bed. This day my wife showed me bills printed,
wherein her father, with Sir John Collidon and Sir Edward Ford, have got a
patent for curing of smoky chimneys.

[The Patent numbered 138 is printed in the appendix to Wheatley's