ame over the ferry from Fulham to Putney.... When I came he
desired me to give him in writing the place where Paul said, _he
was not sent to baptize_; which I presently did. Then courteously
taking his leave, he mounted and rode back--

and, we must suppose, won his wager.

He seemed so taken with me (adds Higginson) as to offer to buy out
the remainder of my time. I told him I expected my master would be
very exorbitant in his demand. He said, let his demand be what it
might, he would give it on condition I would yield to be his
companion, keeping the same company, and I should always, in every
respect, fare as he fared, wearing my clothes like his and of equal
value: telling me then plainly, he was a Deist; adding, so were
most of the noblemen in France and in England; deriding the account
given by the four Evangelists concerning the birth of Christ, and
his miracles, etc., so far that I desired him to desist: for I
could not bear to hear my Saviour so reviled and spoken against.
Whereupon he seemed under a disappointment, and left me with some
reluctance.

In London itself we catch fleeting visions of the eager gesticulating
figure, hurrying out from his lodgings in Billiter Square--'Belitery
Square' he calls it--or at the sign of the 'White Whigg' in Maiden Lane,
Covent Garden, to go off to the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton in
Westminster Abbey, or to pay a call on Congreve, or to attend a
Quaker's Meeting. One would like to know in which street it was that he
found himself surrounded by an insulting crowd, whose jeers at the
'French dog' he turned to enthusiasm by jumping upon a milestone, and
delivering a harangue beginning--'Brave Englishmen! Am I not
sufficiently unhappy in not having been born among you?' Then there are
one or two stories of him in the great country houses--at Bubb
Dodington's where he met Dr. Young and disputed with him upon the
episode of Sin and Death in _Paradise Lost_ with such vigour that at
last Young burst out with the couplet:

You are so witty, profligate, and thin,
At once we think you Milton, Death, and Sin;

and at Blenheim, where the old Duchess of Marlborough hoped to lure him
into helping her with her decocted memoirs, until she found that he had
scruples, when in a fury she snatched the papers out of his hands. 'I
thought,' she cried, 'the man had sense; but I find him at bottom either
a