THIED JOURNEY. 



209 



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. I 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 unex- 

 pected measures, except that there had been some recent 

 smuggling 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 expending 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 lana, y vuelven trasquilados :" 

 Many go for wool, and come home shorn. In order to 



p 



