’Twas ever a merry jest of mine with Mrs Skipwith and Mrs Sternhold that I had done well to hurry on my marriage, so as it took place when it did, for but two or three days later come the news of the death of his majesty King Charles, so that all our festivities was broke up, and had we not been already married, we had been forced in all seemliness to have put it off. But this necessity happily escaped, we did take up our abode at Ellswether with great happiness and contentment, and cared, I fear (and may God forgive us for’t), only too little for public events, considering but our own good fortune. And in this way that year--viz., 1685--passed away, the tidings of the troubles in the West Country and in France reaching us but distantly as rumours, my wife being busied with her household economy and I with the managing my estate, and each of us with the other, for in Dorothy I did continue to discern fresh excellences, such as commended her to me more and more the longer I knew her, and not the least of these in my eyes, the kindness and forbearance that she did continually maintain and increase towards me, her unworthy spouse. Now as time went on, we did engage together in a very weighty enterprise, namely, the writing that book of mine whereby my name (if remembered at all) is now known to the world of polite letters. In so great a work as this I durst not trust my own judgment, but read to my wife all that I had wrote, and took her counsel thereupon, and so made her (says she) near as learned as myself in all that hath respect to the Indies. For it had long seemed to me that there was a prodigious lack of a book that should set forth plainly, yet in full, all that was to be known touching the East that might prove of service either to gentlemen proceeding thither or to persons interested in the matter in England. And this object I flatter myself that my work aforesaid, ‘An Inquiry into the Present State of East India,’ hath attained, for not only doth it treat at length of the manners of the Indians, whether Moors, Gentues, Parsies, or Black Jews, but it hath also a considerable account of all the Europe garrisons and factories, whether English, Dutch, French, or Portuguese, beside the Mogul Empire and the Moorish kingdoms only now destroyed, and likewise of the Moratty power. And this book we did inscribe, as was only meet, to my lord Duke of London, son to him that had done so much to embark me upon my Indian enterprise, and prefaced it with a neat dedicatory epistle in Latin, full of conceits after the classical style, which gave my wife and me a world of pains to write.