Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 December 1888 — KING SOLOMON’S MINES. [ARTICLE]

KING SOLOMON’S MINES.

BY H. RIDER HAGGARD.

CAAFCER If J '•* I MBET SIR HENRY Cl JIT IS. It is a curious thihg that at my age— | .jfifty lasl'llirthday—>l should find myself ’ taking up a pen to try and write a his-1 torr,. I wonder what sort of a history it j will he vFfien I have done it, if I ever j come to the end of the trip! I , have , done a good many things in my life, j which seems a long one to me, owing to | my having begun so yonng, perhaps. At an age when other boys are at school , I was earning my living as a trader in I the old Colony. I have been- trading, ' hunting, mining ever since. And yet j it is only eight months ago that I made ' my pile’ It is a big pile now I have got : it—l don’t know how big—but 1 don’t think I would go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again ior it; no, not if I knew that 1 should come out safe in the end. pile and all. But then I am a timid man, and don’t like violence, and am pretty sick of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write this book; it is not in my line. lam not a literary man, though devoted to the Old Testament and also the “Ingoldsby Legends.’’ Let me try and set down my seasons, just to see if"l have any. First reason: Because Sir Kerry Curtis and Captain John Good asked me to. Second reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban with the pain and trouble in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got bold of me I have been liable to it, and its being rather bad just now makes me limp more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion’s teeth, otherwise how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again, generally, mark you, at the same time of the year that you get your mauling? It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing and -putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don’t like that. This is by the way. Third reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who is over there at the hospital in London studying to become a doctor, to have something to amuse him and keep him out of mischief for a week or so. Hospital work must sometimes pall and get rather dull, for even of cutting up dead bodies there must come satiety, and as this history won’t be dull, whatever else it may be, it may put a little life into things for a ‘lay or two while he is reading it. -