Ashwell once, I bid them adieu.  So home by coach, and thence by water to Deptford to the Trinity House, where I came a little late; but I found them reading their charter, which they did like fools, only reading here and there a bit, whereas they ought to do it all, every word, and then proceeded to the election of a maister, which was Sir W. Batten, without any control, who made a heavy, short speech to them, moving them to give thanks to the late Maister for his pains, which he said was very great, and giving them thanks for their choice of him, wherein he would serve them to the best of his power.  Then to the choice of their assistants and wardens, and so rose.  I might have received 2s. 6d. as a younger Brother, but I directed one of the servants of the House to receive it and keep it.  Thence to church, where Dr. Britton preached a sermon full of words against the Nonconformists, but no great matter in it, nor proper for the day at all.  His text was, “With one mind and one mouth give glory to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  That done, by water, I in the barge with the Maister, to the Trinity House at London; where, among others, I found my Lords Sandwich and Craven, and my cousin Roger Pepys, and Sir Wm. Wheeler.  Anon we sat down to dinner, which was very great, as they always have.  Great variety of talk.  Mr. Prin, among many, had a pretty tale of one that brought in a bill in parliament for the empowering him to dispose his land to such children as he should have that should bear the name of his wife.  It was in Queen Elizabeth’s time.  One replied that there are many species of creatures where the male gives the denomination to both sexes, as swan and woodcock, but not above one where the female do, and that is a goose.  Both at and after dinner we had great discourses of the nature and power of spirits, and whether they can animate dead bodies; in all which, as of the general appearance of spirits, my Lord Sandwich is very scepticall.  He says the greatest warrants that ever he had to believe any, is the present appearing of the Devil

[In 1664, there being a generall report all over the kingdom of Mr. Monpesson his house being haunted, which hee himself affirming to the King and Queene to be true, the King sent the Lord Falmouth, and the Queene sent mee, to examine the truth of; but wee could neither see nor heare anything that was extraordinary; and about a year after, his Majesty told me that hee had discovered the cheat, and that Mr. Monpesson, upon his Majesty sending for him, confessed it to him.  And yet Mr. Monpesson, in a printed letter, had afterwards the confidence to deny that hee had ever made any such confession” ("Letters of the Second Earl of Chesterfield,” p. 24, 1829, 8vo.).  Joseph Glanville published a relation of the famous disturbance at the house of Mr. Monpesson, at Tedworth, Wilts, occasioned by the beating of an invisible drum every night for a year.  This story, which was believed at the time, furnished