As I was one day roving in this city, I was struck with the appearance of a small board ornamented with a considerable quantity of lace, with an inscription on it, fastened to a house: upon inquiry, I found that the lady of the mansion, where I saw it, had lately lain in, and was then much indisposed, and that it was the custom of the country to expose this board, which contained an account of the state of the invalid’s health, for the satisfaction of her inquiring friends, who were by this excellent plan informed of her situation, without disturbing her by knocking at the door, and by personal inquiries: the lace I found was never displayed but in lying in cases, but without it, this sort of bulletin is frequently used in other cases of indisposition amongst persons of consequence. It is a painful task not to be able to close my account of this beautiful and celebrated city, without lamenting with the reader the dreadful accident which befel it on the 12th of January last, more terrible and destructive than all the horrors of its siege, the intelligence of which was communicated to me very soon afterwards by a friend in Holland, just as I had fairly written out thus far of my journal. About one o’clock of that day, a vessel laden with forty thousand pounds weight of gunpowder from Amsterdam, destined for Delft, and then lying in the Rapenburg canal, by some means which can never now be known, took fire and blew up with the explosion of a mighty volcano, by which many hundreds of lives were lost, and a great portion of the city destroyed. The king, on hearing of the dreadful catastrophe was sensibly affected, repaired to the city, remained all the following night in the streets, and was to be seen wherever his presence could animate the survivors to stop the progress of the flames, to clear the rubbish of falling buildings, and drag from under the ruins those who had been covered by them: the king offered the palace in the wood to persons of respectability, whose habitations had been overthrown by the shock, until they could secure homes to repair to; empowered the magistrates of this devoted city to make a general collection throughout the whole kingdom, and ordered 100,000 guilders to be paid out of the treasury for the relief of the surviving sufferers.