Some few days later, he writes a gossipy letter to his daughter, full of little domestic details, most strange and curious to find flowing from the pen of Liberty Wilkes. We find, for instance, "that the gardener's wife increases in size almost as much as his pumpkins," and that "there are thirteen pea-fowls at the cottage, between whom some solemn gallantries are continually passing; and the gallinis are as brisk and amorous as any French _petits-maîtres_. The consequences I foresee. 'Un et un font deux, C'est le nombre heureux, En galanterie, mais quelquefois, Un et un font trois.'" On another occasion we learn that "the farmers are swearing, the parsons praying, for rain; neither hopeful of any result until the weather changes." About this time--on July 7, 1793--Mr. Wilkes has been returning along the Portsmouth Road from London to the Isle of Wight. He found the dust and heat almost overpowering, and the highway crowded with recruits, both for army and navy, who were no small inconvenience to his progress. Portsmouth was full of warlike preparations, Lord Howe expecting to sail the same day with a fleet of twenty sail, perfectly well-conditioned, and the men in high spirits at the prospect of coming to blows with the French. Similarly, the next year, he found the July heat almost beyond endurance. "I almost melted away," he tells Polly, "from the extreme of a suffocating heat before I arrived at Cobham, and a large bowl of lemonade was scarcely sufficient to wash away the dust, which I had been champing for above three hours." A Mr. Hervey, "brother-in-law to Mr. Lambe, a silversmith, and Common Councilman of my ward," was at that time landlord of the "White Hart," at Cobham. "I was well used by him," says Wilkes, "and the house has a very decent appearance, but the poor fellow had tears in his eyes when he told me of thirty-five horse quartered on him." When he reached Liphook, what with two hounds, chained together in the outhouses of the "Anchor," yelping all night, and the intolerable heat, the patriot had no sleep the livelong night, and so resorted to his post-chaise and departed for Portsmouth at an early hour of the morning. Those were busy days in the history of the "Anchor," and the constant stream of poorer wayfarers added to the bustle. Poor folk took a shake-down, with what grace they might summon up, in some clean straw on the floor of outhouses and barns, and in this manner slept the sailor-men who were continually tramping up the road or down. Not that sailors were necessarily poor, but the bedrooms that held royalty were judged to be above the tastes and circumstances of poor Jack, to whom, certainly, clean straw in a barn would seem at any rate infinitely better than the gloomy forecastle which he had just left. [Sidenote: _DECADENCE_]