The summer vacations, when Oxford was deserted, seem to have been spent by Boyle partly in London with Lady Ranelagh and among the _virtuosi_, and partly in the various family country houses, where he was always welcomed as at once the hero, the puzzle, and the pet of this great family. Delicious Leeze, in Essex, where Charles and Mary lived, was not far from London. “You shall be absolute master of your own time,” Mary assured him—conscious, no doubt, that Charles did not know much about the New Philosophy. And at Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire, dear Broghill and Lady Pegg, when they were in England, were most excellent company. Marston was not far from Stalbridge, and though Boyle did not now often stay at his manor-house, he liked to keep it in perfect order, for Frank’s sake, who might have it after him. The “fruit-nurseries” of Stalbridge, especially, were well known in the neighbourhood. “I hear you have that way also a large charity for the public good of England,” wrote Dr. John Beale of Yeovil, in one of his delightful screeds to Boyle. In the summer of 1664, Boyle had been suffering with his eyes; and on his journey to the west—he was apparently that summer at Stalbridge and Marston Bigot—he stayed at Salisbury, to consult his friend and oculist, Dr. Turberville.[286] That autumn, State affairs were almost of more interest at the moment than the transactions of the Society; and war-gossip and Court-gossip occupied a considerable portion of Oldenburg’s letters to Boyle. Hooke, the Curator, wrote also, but his letters were of “the conjunction of Mercury and Sol.” Boyle was back in Oxford in October; and on October 24, when Evelyn paid a visit to Oxford, he found Boyle “with Dr. Wallis and Dr. Christopher Wren in the Tower of the Scholes with an inverted tube or telescope, observing the discus of the Sunn for the passing of Mercury that day before it; but the latitude was so great that nothing appeared.” The little party, disappointed, went on to the Bodleian, and to look at the Sheldonian, then building by the generosity of the Archbishop, and the great picture with too many “nakeds” in it, over the Altar in the chapel of All Souls.[287]