A few of the men consented to follow Franklin’s example, and renouncing beer and cheese, to take for breakfast a basin of warm gruel, with butter, toast, and nutmeg. This did not cost more than a pint of beer--“namely, three halfpence”--and at the same time was more nourishing and kept the head clearer. Those who gorged themselves with beer would sometimes run up a score and come to the Water American for credit, “their light being out.” Franklin attended at the great stone table every Saturday evening to take up the little debts, which sometimes amounted to thirty shillings a week. “This circumstance,” says Franklin in his autobiography, “added to the reputation of my being a tolerable _gabber_--or, in other words, skilful in the art of burlesque--kept up my importance in the ‘chapel.’ I had, besides, recommended myself to the esteem of my master by my assiduous application to business, never observing ‘Saint’ Monday. My extraordinary quickness in composing always procured me such work as was most urgent, and which is commonly best paid; and thus my time passed away in a very pleasant manner.”[504] Franklin, like a truly great man, was quietly proud of the humble origin from which he had risen; and when he came to England as the agent and ambassador of Massachusetts, he paid a visit to his work-room in Wild Street, and going to his old friend the press, said to the two workmen busy at it, “Come, my friends, we will drink together; it is now forty years since I worked like you at this very press as a journeyman printer.” Wild House stood on the site of Little Wild Street. The Duchess of Ormond was living there in 1655.[505] On the day when King James II. escaped from London the mob grew unruly, and assembled in great force to pull down houses where either mass was said or priests lodged. Don Pietro Ronguillo, the Spanish ambassador, who lived at Wild House, and whom Evelyn mentions as having received him with “extraordinary civility” (March 26, 1681), had not thought it necessary to ask for soldiers, though the rich Roman Catholics had sent him their money and plate as to a sanctuary, and the plate of the Chapel Royal was also in his care. But the house was sacked without mercy; his noble library perished in the flames; the chapel was demolished; the pictures, rich beds, and furniture were destroyed,--the poor Spaniard making his escape by a back door.[506] His only comfort was that the sacred Host in his chapel was rescued.[507]