APPENDIX. 575 



I am anxiously waiting for another letter from you, to give me a 

 full account of your visit to imperial Charles. You know that we all 

 like him, notwithstanding his politics ; for he saved our lives at the 

 very time that our salvation here below appeared next to impossible. 

 Pray, say all that is kind from us. When you visit the Jardin des 

 Plantes, I think you may tell them from me, that their whole zoology 

 is anything but what it ought to be that it is fully as bad as that in 

 the British Museum. I here speak of all the four stuffed departments 

 viz., quadrupeds, birds, serpents, and insects. If the chief director 

 of that noble establishment should doubt the solidity of your remark, 

 send him to Walton Hall. CHARLES WATERTON. 



To the Same. 



WALTON HALL, September 15, 1856. 



My dear Friend, We have had our ramble to Aix-la-Chapelle and 

 back again through Belgium. For the first week after our arriving at 

 the celebrated watering-place, we found the weather most charming ; 

 at least, I did. But my sisters swealed away, like a tallow candle 

 before the kitchen-fire ; whilst I myself was all pluck and animation. 

 However, the state of things was too good to last long. Ovid re- 

 marks in his account of Actson's misfortunes, that no man ought to 

 consider himself completely happy on this side of the grave. The sun 

 was as hot and comfortable as on the day when you grumbled so 

 confoundedly at me in Keby's garden at Antwerp ; when suddenly, a 

 huge mass of black clouds arose slowly in the south, and told us to 

 prepare for a storm. The thunder and lightning roared and flashed 

 with terrific fury, the rain fell in torrents, the wind went into the 

 north, and from that time we had not a day that could really be 

 called a summer's day. A similar storm visited our own neighbour- 

 hood here about the same time. It passed Walton Hall about a 

 mile and a half from it, and scourged Badsworth, some ten miles 

 from us, in the most awful manner. Large trees were uprooted ; 

 corn-fields utterly ruined ; potatoes and turnips raised up into the 

 air ; whilst the windows in the house of a gentleman named Jones 

 were shivered into fragments, by hailstones six inches and a half in 

 circumference. Whilst all this was going on in the neighbourhood of 



