The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, MARCH 26. 1929 “THE OLD VISITOR"

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 622, 26 March 1929, Page 10

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, MARCH 26. 1929 “THE OLD VISITOR"

ALL sorts of roameis and adventurers pass through the Port of Auckland as a gateway to wide seas and sunny islands of romance. But none, surely, in a score of years and more, has symbolised so picturesquely so much that is romantic as an old bearded Ulysses who came this way to-day from Sydney en route to America, with his pockets figuratively stuffed with the fortune of quick and unique fame—Alfred Aloysius Horn. Who is this old visitor whose odd life is more interesting for a day than the wisdom and the wiles of politicians? Even his middle name sets him apart from the multitude of ordinary men, linking him with pre-Norman days and the Wars of the Hoses in his native county of Lancashire. “Aloysius? ’Tis a saint’s name. It’s our custom to give a lad two names. One to make his way through life and the other to be bugled out when he knocks at Heaven’s gates. That’ll he the end of my travels. Unless there’s room for roamers there, too. One can always hope there’s some forethought for human nature, he it Heaven or Hell. A feller that’s been a prospector, always with his eye somewhere else than what’s he standing on, won’t' be too agreeably placed on those golden floors they speak of.” That is the man, there’s his philosophy. Three or four years ago he was an itinerant pedlar of gridirons and a mender of wire forks and toasters. And now he is one of the most picturesque figures in modern literature, almost a sage of South Africa, a shrewd observer of men and their sly affairs, and a real man. His memory goes hack over most of the pioneering days of his adopted country, and intimately touches the adventurous times of the ivory trade, the worse traffic in slaves, and the clash of civilisation with the primitive simplicities of savage races. He has remembered all these and, like most old folk with clear memories, loves to talk of other ways in harder days. But he does not need to dredge the past for the gold of true philosophy. In his own untutored manner, he sees through new things as clearly as he has looked across a wide span of time. Some months ago “Trader Horn” was a celebrity in the United States, where a lecturing tour, quite apart from the fabulous profits of editions upon editions of his shrewd books, yielded a bounty sufficient to place him far beyond the need of twistingnew wire into broken toasting-forks. And his penetrating eyes missed nothing in the land of spectacular achievements and stunts. “They want sensations' in America since Prohibition became the rage,” he recently observed. “Deny Nature one way and she’ll get what she wants in another.” Indeed, there was so much acid in his first hook that many of its critics were tempted to cease a practice of their art as reviewers and apply the methods of Scotland Yard in the hope of detecting the secret of its immediate triumph. In plainer words, “Trader Horn” was suspected as a clever hoax perpetrated upon the reading world by a famous South African novelist, Mrs. Ethelreda Lewis. But when it was learnt that the narrative was not only a true record, hut also, as described by Mr. John Galsworthy in an introduction to it, was “a gorgeous hook, more full of sheer stings than any you are likely to come across in a day’s march among the bookshops of wherever you may he,” the critics swung adroitly from hostility to burbling admiration. It is true that the “Old Visitor” was fortunate beyond dreams in knocking at the door of Mrs. Lewis’s home in Capetown, hut.that luck merely served as an efficient vehicle for the expression of a quaint genius, a rare personality, and a raw philosophy-with just enough prejudice to turn his story into “stingo.” And the grizzled rover is now in Auckland, where, possibly, thousands of the citizens at whom he will peer quizzically with the vision of a shaggy prospector have not even yet heard of the wonderful experiences of a hoy trader in the wilds of Africa away back in the early ’Seventies. It will do them good to become acquainted with that period of romance, when youths were riot afraid to run away in search of high adventure and golden success, when men refused to go hat in hand to politicians and plead for doles and easy benefits. Alfred Aloysius Horn represents in his rugged pex-sonality and his pungent wisdom the daring, full life of pioneers and prospectors, those men of stout heart and valiant purpose, who roamed all over a vast Empire and obscurely gave it the pith of character and the paths of progress. “Action a-plenty,” says Trader Horn. It is this that New Zealand needs most.