A MILLIONAIRE ON FOUR SHILLINGS A WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2389, 14 December 1899, Page 55

A MILLIONAIRE ON FOUR SHILLINGS A WEEK.

WESTCOTT'S COVE.

While some men find their chief delight in making and hoarding millions, and others in squandering them, there are to be -found men. who can onl} r find happiness in flying from their wealth and reverting to poverty and obscure living. - Of these men there is none quite so remarkable as Mr Charles Alford, the millionaire hermit of Long Island Sound, a man who is content to forget all about his millions and to lead a life from, which the poorest fisherman would shrink.

Charles Alford, who is the son of a late millionaire carriage-builder, was cradled in every luxury. As a young man he had his town house, crowded from basement to ceiling with everything that luxury could suggest or money could buy ; he had a bungalow in the mountains, and his villa by the seaside. He was owner of one of the most sumptuous yachts in any waters ; he had a luxurious saloon carriage to take him on his journeys, and one of the bestappointed four-in-hands in America.

Hs was one of the leaders of New York Society, and dictated fashions and every form of extravagance to the gilded youths whese purses were more richly supplied than their heads, and he was almost as wall known and as such courted in every country of Europe as in his own Continent.

To-day he lias thrown aside all his trappiags and said farewell to the world of wealth' and fashipn, and is leading ft hermits life on much less than a dollar a week on a few barren rock«, called Westcott's Cove, in Long Inland Sound. He has secured a lsa.se of his island home for 99 years at a rental of £1 a year, and this almost constitutes the bulk of his expenditure. He has built a tiny, one-roomed cabin, in which he has placed a few of his treasures of books and pictures, which are in curious contrast \,o his rough furniture and primitive cooking appliances. Here he passes his days literally, as he says, " as happy as a king,"' and probably a great deal happier. He never leaves his little kingdom except to row out to his nets and bring back the fish for his day's food, or to paddle about his island in the company of a favourite book and his pipe. No one disturbs him, for his barren rocks. have no attraction to the pleasure-seeker or even the fisherman ; and it is only at long intervals that curiosity lakes anyone there.

Mr Alford's chief happiness, however, is in his books, for he is a man of culture as, well as of wealth ; and he thus has conslant and undisturbed communion with the rarest minds of all countries and all centuries.

He has, however, so fai* dissociated himself from the past that in dress and speech he might well to mi&taken for the humblest and irost needy of fisherman, until he is drawn into conversation on his books or the charms of his quaint life. Then he grows eloquent, and lapses into the cultured society man of eailier venrs.

" With my coming here," he says, " the book of my eventful career is closed. And the new, truer, and better pages are unfolded. Not that I love man less, but Nature more. There," pointing over the blue stretch of water that lies between him ani his old life, "I was a creature of my possessions, the slave of a slavish convention j here I an? every inch a man. There, I existed; here, I live; there the dollar is

greater than the man, here the man is greater than all save God.

" Believe me, I have seen all, tried all, and there is nothing than can for a moment compare with the peace and beauty ,of Nature. lam never lonely -with my books, my daily pursuits, and the whole vast communion of nature — how could I be? No one comes to .°ee me, and I go nowhere, save a little way from my island to draw Ilia nets or set my lobster-pots. If happiness is to be found on earth I have found it, and I mean to cling to it as long as life lasts."

And yet all that the world counts worth the having is within this man's grasp; but he knows the price at which such pleasures are bought. '' When," he says, " you know the ennui which comes to a man of refined tastes and sentiments who has tried all phases of vaunted high life and found their emptiness, illusion, and vanity, you will know the depth of my content here." And avlio shall say that he has - hot chosen the better part?

THE ROMANCE OF THE HERMIT OF