As Howard Mather says, Arithmetic on the Frontier. In Departmental Ditties
and p45 of my Definitive Edition.
Supplementary; what was a ruppee worth at the time of writing that a jezail
(we have just learnt that this is a gun and not the bullet itself) costs
ten? And vide "The Post that Fitted" - eight poor rupees a day was a
single man's (?) ration allowance to "cook three meals a day".
And the poem is interesting for the dubious (i.e. inexact) quotation from
the Bible: "captives of our bow and spear" used twice more in the Ziegler
stories - see Journal a few year back.
Jeffery Lewins
from Jeffery Lewins
Magdalene College &
Engineering Department
Cambridge CB3 0AG UK
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