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By E. D. Moore
Author of "Ivory: Scourge of Africa"

I come of somewhat adventurous stock, as my father, at the age of fourteen, ran way to sea and shipped before the mast in the China trade in the Yankee clipper "N.B. Palmer". He made thirteen voyages to China, doubled the Horn a dozen times, and sailed four times around the world. Among my mother's family were some of the earliest traders on the East African coast, the business, later Arnold, Cheney & Co. of New York, being established there in the old days when Zanzibar and the whole coast and interior of East Central Africa was under Arab rule, when the Yankee sailing ships carried out a motley cargo of adds and ends, including muskets and gunpowder, to be exchanged for the ivory the Arab slavers and raiders gathered in their conquest of the interior long before the first white explorers penetrated the center of the continent. These trading activities extended also to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and Madagascar; and several members of the family were early American Consuls at Zanzibar and Aden. One of them, armed with plenipotentiary powers, negotiated a treaty on behalf of the United States with the then independent Sultan of Zanzibar. Another was the first white woman in Zanzibar, and another the first white child to be born there.

It was intended to send me, on leaving school, to Alleppy, on the Malabar coast of India, to trade in coir matting, but the abruptness and unexpectedness of the termination of my education, together with the seeming frailness of my health, so confused and complicated matters that I was shelved; so getting a job at home in the wholesale granite business, I spent the next several years in figuring prices on monuments and drawing full size lettering for tombstones. (I always itch now, in passing acemetery, to browse among the