Up and, being ready, to finish my journall for four days past. To the office, where busy all the morning. At noon dined alone, my wife gone abroad to conclude about her necklace of pearle. I after dinner to even all my accounts of this month; and, bless God! I find myself, notwithstanding great expences of late; viz. 80l. now to pay for a necklace; near 40l. for a set of chairs and couch; near 40l. for my three pictures: yet I do gather, and am now worth 5200l.. My wife comes home by and by, and hath pitched upon a necklace with three rows, which is a very good one, and 80l. is the price. In the evening, having finished my accounts to my full content and joyed that I have evened them so plainly, remembering the trouble my last accounts did give me by being let alone a little longer than ordinary, by which I am to this day at a loss for 50l., I hope I shall never commit such an error again, for I cannot devise where the 50l. should be, but it is plain I ought to be worth 50l. more than I am, and blessed be God the error was no greater.
In the evening with my [wife] and Mercer by coach to take the ayre as far as Bow, and eat and drank in the coach by the way and with much pleasure and pleased with my company. At night home and up to the leads, but were contrary to expectation driven down again with a stinke by Sir W. Pen’s shying of a shitten pot in their house of office close by, which do trouble me for fear it do hereafter annoy me. So down to sing a little and then to bed.
So ends this month with great layings-out. Good health and gettings, and advanced well in the whole of my estate, for which God make me thankful.
bless chair and picture
rice in the evening
and being ordinary
bless error and air
the company and lead
shit and hole
o state make me thankful
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 30 April 1666.