I dreamed that I had great pain of the [kidney-]stone in making water, and that once I looked upon my yard in making water at the steps before my door, and there I took hold of the end of the thing [penis?] and pulled it out [!], and it was a turd [!!]; and it came into my mind that I was in the same condition with [i.e. was ill like] my aunt Pepys, my uncle Robert's wife.

And by and by, on the like occasion, I pulled out something and flung on the ground--it looked like slime or snot, and presently it swelled and turned into a grey kind of bird, and I would have taken it in my hand and it run from me to the corner of the door, going into the garden in the entry by Sir J. Mennes's; and so I waked.

On the fragment of a letter to Mr. Ellis there is mention of a dream he had about his younger niece Alice, "so vivid that I must tell it. She came to me with a penitential face, and told me that she had a great sin to confess; that Pepys's Diary was all a forgery, and that she had forged it. I was in the greatest dismay. "What! I have been quoting in reviews, and in my History, a forgery of yours as a book of the highest authority. How shall I ever hold my head up again?" I woke with the fright, poor Alice's supplicating voice still in my ears."

EDITOR'S NOTE

Pepys's frank diary is still considered one of the great sources on 17th century English life; but entries like this do have a certain childish scatalogical glee.

I bet Alice forged it.

--Chris Wayan

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