In March, 1704, Richard is evidently making great preparations for another sea voyage. He often visits Bear Quay, and is much in the City. Trunks and new clothes seem to be brought now without much difficulty, and Benson's services are not apparently so needful for raising the wind. Richard's friend, old Mrs. Feltham, who keeps a {375} shop in the Exchange, invites him to come and see her and drink-mum, in order to ask him about making her son purser. Richard seems also to have quite a friendly correspondence with the "stuttering parson Woodward," and one is tempted to believe that Lord Poulet may after all have done something for the jilted lover. Richard's circumstances must be a good deal changed, for he can afford to leave twenty guineas with T. Bell to keep for him when he departs for Danes Court, after a merry dinner at the "Blue Posts" in the Haymarket (which he quaintly translates as "los Postes ceruleos en la Feria de feno") with Churchill and others. On the 23rd of March, 1704, he starts for Danes Court, and there the usual life of visiting and feasting is recommenced. On the 11th of April, 1704, there is an entry to the effect that he went to visit Lady Barret, and wrote to Mr. Woodward, and then the curtain drops and all is darkness, which swallows up Richard Bere and all his friends for ever. Where he went and what became of him I have been unable to discover, and the transient gleam thrown across his trivial history by his own folly, in writing down his most secret actions in a language known to many, will in all probability be the only light ever thrown upon his life. John Fogge died soon after, but his widow, Richard Bere's sister, lived at Danes Court in straitened circumstances for many years after. Warren, the antiquary, writing in 1711 (Fausett MS. Kent Archæological Society), deplores that the once fine estate was reduced even then to about fifty pounds a year only, and says that it was uncertain whether any male heir was living--thus soon had scapegrace nephew Dick drifted away {376} from his friends. Warren says that he had been last heard of at Lisbon some years before, but on his mother's death he turned up a common sailor, sold Danes Court to the Harveys in 1724, married a certain Elizabeth Rickasie, a sister of St. Bartholomew's Hospital at Sandwich, and died on board the fleet at Gibraltar in 1740, leaving, says Hasted, an only daughter, married to a poor shepherd named Cock, and living in a lowly hovel near the manor house of which her ancestors had for centuries been masters. [1] _The Gentleman's Magazine_, November, 1891. [Illustration: Tailpiece] {377} INDEX. A.