WANDERINGS IN SOUTH AMERICA. 283 



At last there came an order from the Treasury to say, 

 that any specimens Mr. Watertoii. intended to present to 

 public institutions might pass duty free ; but those which 

 he intended to keep for himself must pay the duty ! 



A friend now wrote to me from Liverpool, requesting 

 that I would come over and pay the duty, in order to save 

 the collection, which had just been detained there six 

 weeks. 1 did so. On paying an additional duty, (for the 

 moderate duty first imposed had already been paid,) the 

 man who had detained the collection delivered it up to 

 me, assuring me that it had been well taken care of, and 

 that a fire had been frequently made in the room. It is 

 but justice to add, that on opening the boxes, there was 

 nothing injured. 



I could never get a clue to these harsh and unexpected 

 measures, except that there had been some recent smug- 

 gling discovered in Liverpool ; and that the man in question 

 had been sent down from London to act the part of Argus. 

 If so, I landed in an evil hour ; " nefasto die ; " making 

 good the Spanish proverb, " Pagan a las veces, justos por 

 pecadores ; " at times the innocent suffer for the guilty. 

 After all, a little encouragement, in the shape of exemption 

 from paying the duty on this collection, might have been 

 expected ; but it turned out otherwise ; and after ex- 

 pending large sums in pursuit of natural history, on my 

 return home I was doomed to pay for my success : 



" Hie finis, Caroli fatorum, hie exitus ilium, 

 Sorte tulit ! " 



Thus, my fleece, already ragged and torn with the thorns 

 and briers, which one must naturally expect to find in 

 distant and untrodden wilds, was shorn, I may say, on its 

 return to England. 



However, this is nothing new ; Sancho Panza must have 

 heard of similar cases ; for he says, " Muchos van por 



