TRADER'S ADVENTURES

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 122, 25 May 1928, Page 11

TRADER'S ADVENTURES

. .. -♦ v A WOMAN'S "FIND" .PROFITABLE TOUR ' (From. '. 2 Post's' '.Representative.: :-,.■■. ';■ .NEW.;YOBK;.4th April. • One day, a little :over a year ago, an old maii '■ came' to the' back porch of a house in a.:: Johannesburg suburb, selling ; odd .bits of- kitchen-ware. A woman who sat' there did not need the articles, he peddled, but, being of a literacy turn, scented a romantic story behind his garrulous, .talk. . She grew more interested "as ho rambled on, talking of -the iwry coastj traffic in slaves, elephants' tusks, a white . priestess in a jungle joss .house, the CuUma'n diamond, theyiHonse-.-.iof-ICommons.-;- ; .He wrote Ma story, for her by candle light. She pieced it together and sent it to London, John Galsworthy, wrote a preface. . ...,-.: „;■-. .. „'. . : . .. . Last week Trader Horn came grandly to New\ York aboard the Olympic and was met at quarantine by a publisher, a lecture agent, ; and ■ &• small army of journalists. ..and ; photographers. .He is now earning £1000 a month -on the American rights-of his book. His. real, name, is -Alfred Smith. Ho'talked of killing'forty,-bull:elephants in a single season,-of, picking. cotton in' Georgia, cradling, wash-dirt in the Yukon, aiding a contemporary of Dickens to report the House: of Commons,, serving on a mine-sweeper in the Great War, helping to quell a rising on the western fron-< tier, oft rambles in Peru, of being kicked in the. head by a giraffe. , Tr'ider, :Horn, conspicuous by his 13----inch beard,,is. about. to undertake a lecture.tour.'of America. ■ . • ■ ■ DOUBTERS OF TRUTHFULNESS. Prior to his departure for England,-• after his single lecture in the United States, Trader Horn was the subject of a growing volume of comment that doubted some of /his stories." Frank: "P.;. Vizetelli, leading .lexicbr graphet..in'the. United States, says that he is a, modern'"Bajon Munchauson." Herrera de Hora, said to have been the head of the international police in the Boer War, questions the authenticity of some of Trader Horn's stories. Six hundred feminine .admirers and a dozen men attended "The Trader's" lecture, and were duly impressed when he exhibited the scars on his leg, made ■when' an African witch-doctor healed the rhinoceros stabs, after white doc tors said ho would have to have a pegleg. He'spun his. yarns with as much gusto as if he were regaling his-cronies in the bar of a Johannesburg hotel. "Gentlemen," heroared to his almost entirely feminine audience, 'fyou don't find one affectionate lion in twenty." A soprano gale of laughter filled the hall, which was echoed when he told of how he tired of his pet lion Peter, that he had brought up from a cub; and drove him back to the jungle. A little late* Peter returned to "The Traders Home with "a pretty littlo thing." He had taken to himself a wife!