AustLit

Scottish deathbed scene. A cottager recalls the joy brought to his life and family for 15 years by his dying wife Mary. She comforts him as her death comes with 121st psalm. Pathos; warm. (PB)

A plot against the imbecilic cruel and corrupt Turkish sultan at the end of the 19th century. The secret Young Turkish party meets and agrees to send a list of supporters to an aide in the palace planning a coup. The son of the party's leader is sent but does not return - though the palace aide flees with the leader's help, revealing that the son has been arrested. The father bribes a prison official to see his son but it is four days before he is taken to the Bosphurous and given a diving suit to walk among a forest of dead weighted bodies waving in the water. He finds his dead son and discovers the list of names undisclosed in the lining of his cloak - destroys it, and returns to the party mourning his son but knowing they are safe. Father-son relationship, and party-leader relationship are strong themes. Very well told adventure tale; the walk beneath the sea is particularly vivid and dream-like. (PB)

Domestic death-bed humour. A farmer's wife, dying, tells her husband of 55 years that she liked the bread crusts he nobly ate for her. Slight. (PB)

A maidservant's absent-mindedness in forgetting to send a telegram for two days costs her her job - and makes her employer worry about his wife and recently delivered child. Domestic humour. (PB)

Parody of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Tomes' conclusions about a visitor from his umbrella are shown to be mistaken. Humour. (PB)

A London police detective's narrative of his detection of a gang of coiners, his infiltration of the gang, and their capture wih the help of other policemen concealed nearby. Slight; includes admiration for the gang's chief. (PB)

A husband scorns his wife's toothache but is convinced he has cancer of the jaw and she has to minister to him. Domestic; humour. (PB)

On the frequency with which the word is taken in vain in vows - and the hope for victory. Deceived wife; drunkard, etc. (PB)

Victorian station romance with a city ending. A young tutor on a country station falls in love with his employer's daughter and reveals his feelings when she rides down the steep side of a volcanic crater to rescue him after a fall. His honesty and noble view of her eventually win her heart and he goes out to fight for his laurels in the Melbourne courts as a lawyer. Weak for Crozier - high-flown and overdone. (PB)

A London doctor is called in by young Lady Studley to attend her husband at their Wiltshire estate. The doctor discovers that the wife is dying of tuberculosis, and that she is causing the nervous illness she had reported in her husband by appearing nightly as a ghostly radiant eye in his room. A double-backed wardrobe, a lamp and a cloak are her props. She wished her husband to die with her ... but dies alone, the doctor protecting her secret. Light, pseudo-detective tale. (PB)

Father-son relationship. A bishop's son, an Oxford undergraduate with extensive debts hopes to pay them off with a racehorse won in a game of cards and entered in a race at very long odds. His father has had extensive losses when an Australian bank fails and when the horse - in which the boy had sold a half-share to the trainer - wins, he offers the money to his father. The bishop confesses he knew the trainer from his Oxford days, the half share in the horse is his, and he won £60 000 on it. Humour. (PB)

A country newspaper editor is complimented extensively on his paper by a visitor - who wishes to have a free notice of his arrival. Humour. In dramatic form. (PB)

On the varieties of liars - lawyers, those who would prove everything, plausible liars, fishermen. Women worst of all. Negro dialect. Humour. (PB)

Adventure; reminiscence of 25 years before. A doctor in a working-class suburb is called by an urgent woman to a sickbed. He is driven mysteriously veiled to a house some distance away and ordered to extract a bullet from a beautiful woman's chest - at pistol-point. He is surrounded by a circle of figures in male dress. He does so, quietly kisses the woman and keeps the secret even when a gang of female thieves is broken up and three of them tried in court. A continental noblewoman is their reputed leader. Style competent; subject interesting. They selected the doctor through his publications in a newspaper. (PB)

Theatre. An actor playing the villain arranges to strike the hero back instead of simply laying down - to impress his parents and fiancée in the audience. Humour. (PB)

Domestic. A mother's eulogy over her decidedly non-genius child. (PB)

Adventure and romance. A newly-married husband tells a friend - the narrator - the tale behind the bicycle in a glass case in his study. It had been the means of saving his wife and her father from an accident in driving their carriage over a washed-out bridge on a stormy night. Happened during the courtship when he was on holiday. He was hurt and the bicycle smashed in the rescue - but his wife-to-be nursed him through his illness and accepted his proposal subsequently. Light. (PB)

Humorous outline in which a western US cowboy is killed and revived in several different ways. (PB)

A poor country woman marries a factory owner and with the help of her brother who acts as their groom she murders him and he is buried in a yard at their weak widowed mother's house. Detective Sinclair, with the aid of the insufficiently bribed cook and another servant tracks the drunk brother to the mother's and arrests sister and brother. (PB)

Domestic exchange set in the future. Housekeeper Mr Henne-Pecque wants to join the Masons but Mrs Henne-Pecque as head of the household refuses to let him and buys him off with weekly theatre matinee tickets. (PB)