DANGERS OF FEES. 257 



the stone under which it crawled, I expressed my en- 

 thusiasm by at once promising him an enlarged fee — 

 a most impolitic action on my part, and one which 

 completely unsettled my companion's mind. From 

 that moment he became a bore. Every animal I con- 

 descended to bag, became the object of his loudest 

 laudations, in the dim hope that somehow he might per- 

 suade me I had secured a brilliant specimen, one caus- 

 ing fresh overflows of generosity on my part. " Well, 

 he be a beauty ! We arn't seen one like him before, I 

 reckon? He's worth a sovereign, 111 bet a guinea!" 

 This was the running accompaniment he kept up, as 

 he handed me an Anemone or a bit of Sponge. The 

 Sponges especially alternately excited and damped his 

 hopes. He was constantly exclaiming " Oh 1 look 

 here, then ! what be this?" and as constantly hearing, 

 " Only a Sponge, Pat," which greatly moderated his 

 ardour. One moment I thought he was going to per- 

 suade me the Sponge was immensely valuable, but he 

 digressed into safer admiration of the An5"»elids just 

 captured. In fact, as I said, my outburst had been 

 most impolitic, by rousing visions of El Dorado. From 

 that moment his conversation pointed with fatiguing 

 monotony in the one direction of extra fees. The next 

 day I took another man, and we found more speci- 

 mens of the Pleurohranchus than I had room for. 

 A dozen were brought home ; and as — to judge from 

 all the works accessible in Scilly — the anatomy of this 

 mollusc has not been studied since Meckel described 

 it, these dozen specimens will afi'ord me ample means 



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