"Very well, see you at dinner. I hope they've sent back my dress
shirts from the wash. O, lord! I am sleepy."

I left him going up to bed, and went outside and ordered a
carriage to take me down, and there I may say we parted for a
considerable time. A cable was waiting for me in the hotel at Las
Palmas to go home for business forthwith, and there was a Liverpool
boat in the harbour which I just managed to catch as she was
steaming out. It was a close thing, and the boatmen made a small
fortune out of my hurry.

Now Coppinger was only an hotel acquaintance, and as I was up to
the eyes in work when I got back to England, I'm afraid I didn't
think very much more about him at the time. One doesn't with
people one just meets casually abroad like that. And it must have
been at least a year later that I saw by a paragraph in one of the
papers, that he had given the lump of sheets to the British Museum,
and that the estimated worth of them was ten thousand pounds at the
lowest valuation.

Well, this was a bit of revelation, and as he had so repeatedly
impressed on me that the things were mine by right of discovery,
I wrote rather a pointed note to him mentioning that he seemed to
have been making rather free with my property. Promptly came
back a stilted letter beginning, "Doctor Coppinger regrets" and so
on, and with it the English translation of the wax-upon-talc
MSS. He "quite admitted" my claim, and "trusted that the profits
of publication would be a sufficient reimbursement for any damage
received."