Pepys, finding her absent without leave, went after her, found her in her mother's house, and there _beat her_. The mother having urged that Mary was "not a common prentice girl," and therefore ought not to have been thus chastized, Mrs. Pepys construed it into a question of her right to inflict corporal chastisement, and dismissed Mary. In October, 1666, says Pepys, "my wife brought a new girle. She is wretched poor, and but ordinary favoured, and we fain to lay out seven or eight pounds worth of clothes upon her back: and I do not think I can esteem her as I could have done another, that had come fine and handsome; and, which is more, her voice, through want of use, is so furred that it do not at present please me; but her manner of singing is such that I shall, I think, take great pleasure in it." After a while Mary Mercer was taken back, and then we hear of singing on the water, especially after a trip to Greenwich when returning by moonlight. The boy Tom was usually of the party. Of him Pepys says (Oct. 25, 1664), "My boy could not sleep, but wakes about four in the morning, and in bed laying playing on his lute till daylight, and it seems did the like last night, till twelve o'clock." And again, Dec. 26, 1668, "After supper I made the boy play upon his lute, and so, my mind is mighty content,--to bed." We do not in the least suppose that Pepys' household was singular in the respect of having a succession of musical servants. All people in those times were musical--men, boys, women, and girls, of all classes and degrees. At the fire of London in 1666, Pepys, who was an eye-witness, tells us that the Thames was full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and that he "observed that hardly one lighter or boat in three, that had the goods of a house, but there was a pair of virginals in it." How those old fellows loved and cared for their instruments! Mace, a writer of 1676, tells how a lute should be treated. "You shall do well," he writes, "even when you lay it by in the day-time, to put it into a bed that is constantly used, between the rug and the blanket, but never between the sheets, because they may be moist. There are great commodities (advantages) in so doing; it will save the strings from breaking; it will keep your lute in good order." He enumerates six conveniences of so doing. At that time a lute, a good one, cost about £100.