Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

SAMUEL PEPYS
harslett is ' a piece of meat he loves.' He cannot
ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he
must exclaim, with breathless gusto, ' his noble, rich
coach.' When he is bound for a supper-party he
anticipates a * glut of pleasure.' When he has a new
watch, ' to see my childishness,' says he, ' I could not
forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what
o'clock it was an hundred times.' To go to Vauxhall,
he says, and 'to hear the nightingales and other
birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's
trump, and here laughing, and there fine people
walking, is mighty divertising.' And the nightin-
gales, I take it, were particularly dear to him ; and
it was again ' with great pleasure ' that he paused to
hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the fog
was rising and the April sun broke through.
He must always be doing something agreeable,
and, by preference, two agreeable things at once. In
his house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs,
an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled
tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance
upon an empty moment. If he had to wait for a
dish of poached eggs, he^ must put in the time by
playing on the fiageolet ; if a sermon were dull, he
must read in the book of Tobit or divert his mind
with sly advances on the nearest women. When he
walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to
beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent ;
and even along the streets of London, with so many
pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be
saluted, his trail was marked by little debts ' for wine,