11th.  Up and spent most of the morning upon my measuring Ruler and with great pleasure I have found out some things myself of great dispatch, more than my book teaches me, which pleases me mightily.  Sent my wife’s things and the wine to-day by the carrier to my father’s, but staid my boy from a letter of my father’s, wherein he desires that he may not come to trouble his family as he did the last year.  Dined at home and then to the office, where we sat all the afternoon, and at night home and spent the evening with my wife, and she and I did jangle mightily about her cushions that she wrought with worsteds the last year, which are too little for any use, but were good friends by and by again.  But one thing I must confess I do observe, which I did not before, which is, that I cannot blame my wife to be now in a worse humour than she used to be, for I am taken up in my talk with Ashwell, who is a very witty girl, that I am not so fond of her as I used and ought to be, which now I do perceive I will remedy, but I would to the Lord I had never taken any, though I cannot have a better than her.  To supper and to bed.  The consideration that this is the longest day in the year is very unpleasant to me.—­[It is necessary to note that this was according to the old style.]—­This afternoon my wife had a visit from my Lady Jeminah and Mr. Ferrers.

12th.  Up and my office, there conning my measuring Ruler, which I shall grow a master of in a very little time.  At noon to the Exchange and so home to dinner, and abroad with my wife by water to the Royall Theatre; and there saw “The Committee,” a merry but indifferent play, only Lacey’s part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination.  Here I saw my Lord Falconbridge, and his Lady, my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the House began to fill she put on her vizard,

[Masks were commonly used by ladies in the reign of Elizabeth, and when their use was revived at the Restoration for respectable women attending the theatre, they became general.  They soon, however, became the mark of loose women, and their use was discontinued by women of repute.  On June 1st, 1704, a song was sung at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields called “The Misses’ Lamentation for want of their Vizard Masques at the Theatre.”  Mr. R. W. Lowe gives several references to the use of vizard masks at the theatre in his interesting biography, “Thomas Betterton.”]

and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.  So to the Exchange, to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself.  And so by water home and to my office to do a little business, and so to see Sir W. Pen, but being going to bed and not well I could not see him.  So home and to supper and bed, being mightily troubled all night and next morning with the palate of my mouth being down from some cold I took to-day sitting sweating in the playhouse, and the wind blowing through the windows upon my head.