SOUTH AMERICA. 
229 
I could never get a clue to these harsh and unex- third 
pected measures, except that there had been some-— 
recent smuggling discovered in Liverpool; and that 
the man in question had been sent kown from Lon¬ 
don to act the part of Argus. If so, I landed in an 
evil hour; u 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, w r as shorn, I 
may say, on its return to England. 
However, this is nothing new; Sancho Panza Conciu- 
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 pick up matter for natural history, I 
have wandered through the wildest parts of South 
America’s equatorial regions. I have attacked and 
slain a modern Python, and rode on the back of a 
cayman close to the water’s edge; a very different 
situation from that of a Hyde-park dandy on his 
Sunday prancer before the ladies. Alone and bare- 
