23rd.  Up, and Greeting comes, who brings me a tune for two flageolets, which we played, and is a tune played at the King’s playhouse, which goes so well, that I will have more of them, and it will be a mighty pleasure for me to have my wife able to play a part with me, which she will easily, I find, do.  Then abroad to White Hall in a hackney-coach with Sir W. Pen:  and in our way, in the narrow street near Paul’s, going the backway by Tower Street, and the coach being forced to put back, he was turning himself into a cellar,—­[So much of London was yet in ruins.—­B]—­which made people cry out to us, and so we were forced to leap out—­he out of one, and I out of the other boote;

[The “boot” was originally a projection on each side of the coach, where the passengers sat with their backs to the carriage.  Such a “boot” is seen in the carriage containing the attendants of Queen Elizabeth, in Hoefnagel’s well-known picture of Nonsuch Palace, dated 1582.  Taylor, the Water Poet, the inveterate opponent of the introduction of coaches, thus satirizes the one in which he was forced to take his place as a passenger:  “It wears two boots and no spurs, sometimes having two pairs of legs in one boot; and oftentimes against nature most preposterously it makes fair ladies wear the boot.  Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways, as they are when they sit in the boot of the coach.”  In course of time these projections were abolished, and the coach then consisted of three parts, viz., the body, the boot (on the top of which the coachman sat), and the baskets at the back.]

Query, whether a glass-coach would have permitted us to have made the escape?—­[See note on introduction of glass coaches, September 23rd, 1667.]—­neither of us getting any hurt; nor could the coach have got much hurt had we been in it; but, however, there was cause enough for us to do what we could to save ourselves.  So being all dusty, we put into the Castle tavern, by the Savoy, and there brushed ourselves, and then to White Hall with our fellows to attend the Council, by order upon some proposition of my Lord Anglesey, we were called in.  The King there:  and it was about considering how the fleete might be discharged at their coming in shortly (the peace being now ratified, and it takes place on Monday next, which Sir W. Coventry said would make some clashing between some of us twenty to one, for want of more warning, but the wind has kept the boats from coming over), whether by money or tickets, and cries out against tickets, but the matter was referred for us to provide an answer to, which we must do in a few days.  So we parted, and I to Westminster to the Exchequer, to see what sums of money other people lend upon the Act; and find of all sizes from L1000 to L100 nay, to L50, nay, to L20, nay, to L5:  for I find that one Dr. Reade, Doctor of Law, gives no more, and others of them L20; which is a poor thing, methinks, that we should stoop