ALOYSIUS HORN

Evening Star, Issue 20134, 26 March 1929, Page 8

ALOYSIUS HORN

IVORY GOAST “ORIGINAL” SPEAKS (.Speciu, to the St a a.’] AUCKLAND, March 26. “Aye, I’m Aloysms Horn—Trader Horn, some call me—tin .ugh my real name is Smith ; but there are far too many Smiths, and that’s why I’m Horn ” The picturesque old passenger who greeted tin interviewer’s inquiry with these words or tins Maunganui this morning was none other than that Alfred Aloysius He n whose romantic tales of the Ivor , Coast have made his name famous wherever books are read. And those books have made him wealthy.

Seated in Ids cabin this morning ho great old man—lie is almost eighty—told the story of his life in a few whimsical sentences. “ You won’t ask me dates or figures,” lie began, “ for long ago rny arithmetic went over the edge into the beyond, and that’s a story. My friend shot me through a. lion. Foolishly I had followed. the lion, in daylight, too, into the jungle undergrowth, and the lion got me. My. gun jammed, and the lion began to nibble my hack. I’ve had a terrible hack ever since. I was swooning when the young fellow fired and got the lion and me too-knocked a bit off the side of my head, and that bit was my I O U box. After that I had no figures, hut 1 could always remember You and, I, even if I forgot the ‘owe.’ ” The devil-may-earo blue eyes of the Ivory Coast veteran sparkled with merriment, and ho ran his hands through Ids long, tawny beard. “What made mo 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 limes over, hut my money always bad legs, and it sprinted so last I could never catch up. It’s true my books have brought me inonev they sell in some parts at four dollars apiece, and 250,000 copies were grabbed up in the first yeai and a-half. How much is that? Never mmd, Ive got the money to go about the world—the world that I’ve roamed all those years Now in inv old ago it is nice to have i_. ‘ to have the cities of the woild come’ nn to me swiftly from the horizon that f see from the cosy deck of a steam ship. The world never looked so idee before. Take my word Hie saloon deck makes foot-slogging odious.