October 1st.  Up and betimes to my office, and then to sit, where Sir G. Carteret, Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Pen, Sir J. Minnes, Mr. Coventry and myself, a fuller board than by the King’s progresse and the late pays and my absence has been a great while.  Sat late, and then home to dinner.  After dinner I by water to Deptford about a little business, and so back again, buying a couple of good eeles by the way, and after writing by the post, home to see the painter at work, late, in my wife’s closet, and so to supper and to bed, having been very merry with the painter, late, while he was doing his work.  This day the King and Court returned from their progress.

2nd.  Up betimes and by water to St. James’s, and there visited Mr. Coventry as a compliment after his new coming to town, but had no great talk with him, he being full of business.  So back by foot through London, doing several errands, and at the ’Change met with Mr. Cutler, and he and I to a coffee-house, and there discoursed, and he do assure me that there is great likelyhood of a war with Holland, but I hope we shall be in good condition before it comes to break out.  I like his company, and will make much of his acquaintance.  So home to dinner with my wife, who is over head and eares in getting her house up, and so to the office, and with Mr. Lewes, late, upon some of the old victuallers’ accounts, and so home to supper and to bed, up to our red chamber, where we purpose always to lie.  This day I received a letter from Mr. Barlow, with a Terella,

[Professor Silvanus P. Thompson, F.R.S., has kindly supplied me with the following interesting note on the terrella (or terella):  The name given by Dr. William Gilbert, author of the famous treatise, “De Magnete” (Lond. 1600), to a spherical loadstone, on account of its acting as a model, magnetically, of the earth; compass-needles pointing to its poles, as mariners’ compasses do to the poles of the earth.  The term was adopted by other writers who followed Gilbert, as the following passage from Wm. Barlowe’s “Magneticall Advertisements” (Lond. 1616) shows:  “Wherefore the round Loadstone is significantly termed by Doct.  Gilbert Terrella, that is, a little, or rather a very little Earth:  For it representeth in an exceeding small model (as it were) the admirable properties magneticall of the huge Globe of the earth” (op. cit, p. 55).  Gilbert set great store by his invention of the terrella, since it led him to propound the true theory of the mariners’ compass.  In his portrait of himself which he had painted for the University of Oxford he was represented as holding in his hand a globe inscribed terella.  In the Galileo Museum in Florence there is a terrella twenty-seven inches in diameter, of loadstone from Elba, constructed for Cosmo de’ Medici.  A smaller one contrived by Sir Christopher Wren was long preserved in the museum of the Royal Society (Grew’s “Rarities belonging to the Royal Society,” p. 364).  Evelyn was shown “a pretty terrella described with all ye circles and skewing all y magnetic deviations” (Diary, July 3rd, 1655).]

which I had hoped he had sent me, but to my trouble I find it is to present from him to my Lord Sandwich, but I will make a little use of it first, and then give it him.