No copies of the book are available and it has not been digitised. Web archives reveal he was in the 108th Foot Regiment and he was a member of the Northumberland and Northern Counties Club. Punch mentions him and his wife in 1916 - the victim of a Pooter like misprint: 'Mrs. Wray entertained the recruiting staff, numbering £21, to tea at Brett's Hall, Guildford, on Thursday.' They add 'Sterling fellows obviously'.
THE NATIVE MATCHLOCK
One desperately hot day, in one of the hottest Stations of India, with the thermometer standing at anything between 105 and 115 degrees in the shade and life a burden, we in the Mess were trying to forget our mid-day miseries by playing "Fly Loo" after Lunch. "Fly Loo" is about the only game that can be played in that temperature as it requires no exercise of intellect or fatiguing effort of any kind. All that the players have to do is to sit round the table each with a lump of sugar in front of him and he whose lump of sugar a fly first seats itself wins the game and becomes the possessor of the stakes which, of course, are quite nominal. The excitement is intense and the simultaneous shouts of claimants dispel all forebodings of heat apoplexy and the consciousness of discomfort which are inseparable from the stifling atmosphere.
During one of these entertainments, a Mess Waiter whispered to me that a villager was outside and wanted me urgently.
I slipped away from the excited players unobserved and unquestioned as it was for too hot, and the game too absorbing for any of them to interest themselves in other people's affairs, and I was glad of this for I knew that it meant news that I had been expecting for some days of a large tiger, and selfish as it may seem I was anxious to go after him alone, as the jungle, which he had been monopolizing for some time past was not big enough for more than one gun.
