You know, Welcome back everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales. This is your host, John Haggardorn. H. Wr Hagerd was one of the most popular writers in the 19th century.

He was very much enjoyed by outdoor sportsmen and wrote a number of novels and short

stories, which we've covered here.

But we've never covered this one.

It's called The Spring of a Lion.

It was written in 1890.

And we're proud to be able to bring it to you today.

And now the Spring of a Lion, a Hunter-Cordermane story by H. Ryder Haggard.

The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from the lips of my old friend Alan Corderman, or Hunter Corderman, as we used to call him in South Africa.

He told it to me one evening when I was stopping with him at a place he bought in Yorkshire,

accompanied by his two companions. Shortly after that, the death of his only son so unsettled him

that he immediately left England, accompanied by two companions who were old fellow

voyages of his, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the

dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of whom he has heard rumors all his life,

exist somewhere in the highlands of the vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition

is to find them before he dies.

This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions have departed, and from which I shrewdly

suspect they will never return.

One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a mission station high up

in the Tana, a river

on the east coast about 300 miles north of Zanzibar. In it, he says they have gone through

many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far toward

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