ALOYSIUS HORN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3924, 28 March 1929, Page 3

ALOYSIUS HORN.

ARRIVAL IN AUCKLAND. LIFE OF ADVENTURE. tr>-H “Aye, I’m Aloysius Horn —‘Trader” Horn some call me —though my real naime is S'mith, but there are far too many Smiths, and that’s why I’m Horn.” A picturesque old passenger who greeted the interviewer’s inquiry with these words on the Maunganui at Auckland on Tuesday morning was none other than Alfred Aloysius Horn, whose romantic tales of the Ivory -Coast have made his name famous, and whose books have made him wealthy. -Seated in a -cabin this morning the 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 daylight boo —into the jungle undergrowth and tlhe lion got me. My gun jammed. The lion began to nibble my back. I have had a terrible back ever since. I was -swooning when the young fellow fired, 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 no figures,”' The devel-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 an itch to be off. I was only a kid when I left, and -now they say I am the oldest living prospector'on the Rand.

“Am I wealthy Didn’t I say that figures don’t counit? I have been wealthy several times over, but my money always had legs. It sprinted so fast that I could never catch up. It’te -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 I’ve got the money to go about the world —'the world that I’ve roamed all these years. Now in imy old age it is nice to have. It is easy to have the cities of the -world come up to line swiftly from the horizon —that I see from the cosy deck of the steamship. The world never looked so nice before. Take my woril, the saloon deck intakes foot slogging arduous.