AustLit

Sunday school superintendant scriptural text and a 'pickaninnies' interpretation. (PB)

Confrontation between a detective and an absconding director of an English gold trust on a French express train. The detective is murdered but his murderer suicides at Marseilles station when he sees detectives waiting for him. (PB)

The dim but strong and tender-hearted Dick Eaton falls in love with intelligent social beauty Lilian Girton who ignores him in favour of the gifted artistic men who surround her. That is, until he takes pity on a poor kitten in the street and smuggles it into one of her parties to look after it. Her vision of him changes. (PB)

Death of a Scottish piper amidst his fallen Highland comrades on the battlefield. Male courage. (PB)

Two youths in love with the same girl play three games of chess to decide who shall woo her. Just as the third game is being completed another 'chap' enters to tell them she has agreed to marry him. (PB)

Tale of true love neglected for mercenary motives. A poor gentleman breaks his engagement with a beauty forced by poverty to act as a lady's companion. He pursues, proposes and is accepted by an old maid believed to be rich whom he meets at a coastal resort. Just before the wedding he learns she is poor and a little mad, and his former fiancee has received an inheritance and is married to his best friend. He ends his days as a sensible shop owner and bachelor writer of romances. (PB)

Romantic tragedy. A Mediterranean girl falls in love with the foreign painter who paints her portrait and dies to save him from a trap set by her father and his robber cronies. He loves another noble lady ... (PB)

Biographical. Mozart's frenzied composition of the Requiem that cost him his life. (PB)

Domestic humour. Husband and wife quarrel over getting business cards printed when coal bill is unpaid. He gets them printed but she shows their uselessness. (PB)

US Civil War and the death of a young boy at the end of his first day of battle. An old negro soldier brings him some water and he dies with visions of home, his mother and sister. (PB)

A poor farmer's wife tires of the isolation and monotony of their life as he clears the land and leaves for London to learn singing. Three years later, she a success and he rich from a gold discovery are reunited in London. She longs to return home but he says the past is gone and the world is great - travel is the new way for them together. (PB)

Two boarding school girls home for Christmas holidays kill one of the burglars attempting to rob the house and lead to the capture of the other. Female friendship and courage. (PB)

Set in a gentleman's club. A member involved in mining speculation changes his attitude when he and not the public is cheated. (PB)

Humorous romance. A businessman finally realises he is rich and seeking home life and companionship proposes to his secretary - by letter which she helps compose. Plays upon financial and affectionate 'partnerships'. She resigns and replies by letter too. (PB)

A Nebraska newspaper's editor's explanation of the lateness of the paper - machinery breakdown and not drunkenness. (PB)

Faded slippers and an old dress remind an aged woman of her innocent marriage to a bigamist; her loyalty to him and the estrangement from her father that her remarriage to him after his prison sentence caused. Their hard years as she struggled to support him, his drinking and finally his death from wounds received in a robbery. She returned after her father's death to her childhood home and buried the past - dragged up in this story by a young visitor. (PB)

Station tragedy. An absentee station owner's manager Kyle plans to marry Letty the pretty step-daughter of a tenant farmer but his legal wife, the old housekeeper who he is trying to to poison, betrays his secrets to her employer. Meanwhile Letty wants to marry the trainee station manager, a young friend of the owner - Kyle's murder by his wife and the station owner's intervention on the young couple's behalf change events. A stockman's dream discovers Kyle's body where his murdress had thrown him after poisoning his toddy with the powder he had been slowly feeding her. Not as horror-filled and gory as earlier tales. (PB)

Anecdote told by Twain of a preacher who discourses on the possibile future for a child - until he discovers it is a girl. Introduction says Twain told the anecdote for the crew aboard a steamer from New York to Genoa. (PB)

Civil war tale. A drummer boy is killed in the last days of the war but rouses kindness in the hearts of his own side and the enemy (Confederates). (PB)