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:
Hic finis, Caroli fatorum, hic exitus illum,
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 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.
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