114 SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. 



fund whilst in the custody of the court, as will be seen in 

 the concluding part of the decree. That this was the exact 

 residue coming to me, will be further seen by an explana- 

 tory letter from the solicitors of the 5th of July, also en- 

 closed, (marked C,)and more authoritatively by a document 

 (marked D) from the books of the accountant general of the 

 court, sent to me by the solicitors, with their letter of the 

 11th of July. This document, besides verifying in its own 

 forms the amount of stock and money I have otherwise 

 stated myself to have received, also verifies the statements 

 in my Nos. 20 and 28, as to the sums awarded to Madame 

 de la Batut, the arrears to John Fitall, and the money de- 

 creed as warehouse rent for the boxes containing the per- 

 sonal effects of Mr. Smithson, which I brought over and 

 delivered into the custody of the collector at ]^ew York. 

 It is a document founded- on the decree of the court itself, 

 and shows in more detail how its judgments were ful- 

 filled. 



I received on the 12th of July £900 at the Bank of Eng- 

 land, being the dividend due on the consols I had sold, as 

 mentioned in my No. 29 ; and, lastly, I received from the 

 solicitors £116 25. 2d., being money returned b}' them out of 

 what I had paid them for costs on the 8th day of April, 1837^ 

 viz : £200 4s., as reported in my No. 14. The following is 

 the explanation of this item: When I paid them this sum, 

 I fully expected to pay all further costs out of the same 

 fund, then in my hands, that Congress had appropriated for 

 that purpose ; but it appears that, on the termination of the 

 suit in favor of the United States, the costs of all parties 

 were paid out of the corpus of the fund ; nor would the court 

 award the fund to the United States, as may be seen by the 

 decree, until all costs were accordingly first taken out of it, 

 which* the court judged it proper the fund itself should 

 bear. I knew not of such a rule which the solicitors advert 

 to in their letter of July the 5th, until a short time before 

 the decree was pronounced. The total amount of their 

 costs, as made known to me in the same letter, and set out 

 in detail in a voluminous bill, which I enclose, (marked E,) 

 and to which I caused their aflidavits to be annexed, was 

 £490 4.S. lOcl. The court adjudged £406 3s. of this sum to 

 be paid to them out of the fund, as their taxed costs, which, 

 added to what I had previously paid them, made £606 7s. 

 The difierencc between this and £490 4s. lOd. being £116 

 2s. 2d., they refunded the latter sum to me. Their total 

 bill, (considering that it included all fees paid by them 

 under my direction to the counsel, and all costs and charges 



