First came a delay of three days off the squalid shores of Wapping and Rotherhithe, whereby opportunity was afforded of "tasting a delicious mixture of the air of both these sweet places," and of enjoying such a concord of the voices of seamen, watermen, fishwomen, oyster women and their like as Hogarth indicated "in that print of his which is enough to make a man deaf to look at." This delay, moreover, threatened to bring Fielding within need of a surgeon when none should be procurable. His friend Mr William Hunter of Covent Garden, brother of the more famous John Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred in the torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant was despatched in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,' arrived after the ship had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of June, left her unsavoury moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair and bright," and the diarist records how, dropping down to Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think as pleasant as can be conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were 'noble sights'; the Thames with its splendid shipping excelled all the rivers of the world; and the men of war, the unrivalled Indiamen, the other traders, and even the colliers and small craft, all combined to form "a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart of an Englishman, who has any degree of love for his country, or can recognise any effect of the patriot in his constitution." And here Fielding gives us a notable example of his own healthy taste in recreation; a taste agreeing very ill with the scurrilous popular myths concerning him, but entirely consonant with the manifest atmosphere of his genius. He deplores the general neglect of "what seems to me the highest degree of amusement: that is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of our own"; an amusement which need not "exceed the reach of a moderate fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for pleasures of a far inferior rate."