A TRAVELLER’S TALES

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 March 1929, Page 5

A TRAVELLER’S TALES

TRADER HORN’S ARRIVAL

• NIBBLED BY LION

(Special to ‘‘Star.”)

AUCKLAND, March 26. “Aye, I’m Aloysius Horn. Trader Horn, some cail me, though my real name is Smith, but there are far too many Smiths, and that’s why I’m Horn.”

The pirturesque old passenger, who greeted the interviewer’s enquiry with these words, on the Maunganui this morning, was none other than Alfred Aloysius Horn, whose romantic tales of the Ivory Coast have made his name famous wherever books are read." And those books have made him wealthy. Seated in tbe cabin this morning the great old man—he is almost eighty—told the story of 'his life in a few whimsical sentences. “You won’t ask me dates or figures,” he began. “For long ago, my arithmetic went over the edge, and into beyond, and that’s a story. My friend shot me through a lion. Foolishly, I had followed the lion, in the daylight too, into the jungle undergrowth, and the lion got me. My gun jammed, and the lion began to nibble my back. I’ve had a terrible back ever- since. I was swooning when a young fellow fired and got the lion and me, too. He knocked a bit off the side of my head, and that bit was my 1.0. U. box. After that I had not figures, but I could always remember the you, even if I forgot the “owe.” The devil-may-care blue eyes of the Ivory Coast veteran . sparkled with merriment, and he ran his hands through his long tawny beard. “What made me leave home? Just the itch to be off. I was only a kid when I left, and now they say I’m the oldest living prospector on the Rand. “Am I wealthy? Didn’t I say that figures don’t count? I’ve been wealthy several times over, but my money always had legs. It sprinted so fast I could never catch up. It’s true, my books have brought me money. They sell in some parts at four dollars apiece, and 250,000 copies were grabbed up in the first year and a-half. How much is that? Never mind, ’lve got the money to go about the world that I’ve roamed all these years. Now in my old age, it is nice to have it easy, to have cities of the world come up to me swiftly from the horizon that I see from the cosy deck of a steamship. The world never looked so nice before. Take my word, the saloon deck makes foot-slogging odious.”