we could hardly wake it in an hour’s time without hurting it, and they tell me what I did not know, that a child (as this do) will hunt and hunt up and down with its mouth if you touch the cheek of it with your finger’s end for a nipple, and fit its mouth for sucking, but this hath not sucked yet, she having no nipples.  Here sat a while, and then my wife and I, it being a most curious clear evening, after some rain to-day, took a most excellent tour by coach to Bow, and there drank and back again, and so a little at the office, and home to read a little, and to supper and bed mightily refreshed with this evening’s tour, but troubled that it hath hindered my doing some business which I would have done at the office.  This day the newes is come that the fleete of the Dutch, of about 20 ships, which come upon our coasts upon design to have intercepted our colliers, but by good luck failed, is gone to the Frith,—­[Frith of Forth.  See 5th of this month.]—­and there lies, perhaps to trouble the Scotch privateers, which have galled them of late very much, it may be more than all our last year’s fleete.

4th.  Up and to the office, where sat all the morning, among other things a great conflict I had with Sir W. Warren, he bringing a letter to the Board, flatly in words charging them with their delays in passing his accounts, which have been with them these two years, part of which I said was not true, and the other undecent.  The whole Board was concerned to take notice of it, as well as myself, but none of them had the honour to do it, but suffered me to do it alone, only Sir W. Batten, who did what he did out of common spite to him.  So I writ in the margin of the letter, “Returned as untrue,” and, by consent of the Board, did give it him again, and so parted.  Home to dinner, and there came a woman whose husband I sent for, one Fisher, about the business of Perkins and Carcasse, and I do think by her I shall find the business as bad as ever it was, and that we shall find Commissioner Pett a rogue, using foul play on behalf of Carcasse.  After dinner to the office again, and there late all the afternoon, doing much business, and with great content home to supper and to bed.

5th (Lord’s day).  Up, and going down to the water side, I met Sir John Robinson, and so with him by coach to White Hall, still a vain, prating, boasting man as any I know, as if the whole City and Kingdom had all its work done by him.  He tells me he hath now got a street ordered to be continued, forty feet broad, from Paul’s through Cannon Street to the Tower, which will be very fine.  He and others this day, where I was in the afternoon, do tell me of at least six or eight fires within these few days; and continually stirs of fires, and real fires there have been, in one place or other, almost ever since the late great fire, as if there was a fate sent people for fire.  I walked over the Park to Sir W. Coventry’s.  Among other things to tell him what I hear of people being forced