AustLit

Set in New Orleans, a duel between two gaming gentlemen is settled by swallowing pills, one of which is filled with Prussic acid. Dashing southern tale, impact not depth of characterisation. (PB)

An incorrigbly messy man redeems his dress when an attractive young woman enters his life. Light humour. (PB)

An infant's contentment in her parent's home, a sudden illness and death, and the sad grave and empty house. (PB)

Father-daughter story set in Pensacola, USA. A well-bred beautiful 17 year old girl offers to help nurse the victims of yellow fever in the stricken city in order to search for her alcoholic father. She finds him on his death-bed then sickens herself - their incomplete lives rounded out in the hereafter (!) - slight, sentimental. (PB)

This tale of an embroidered vest reveals a tragic romance set in Scotland where two cousins are separated by a father's determination that his daughter should marry a richer man. Clement Nairne comes to Australia as Stanley Eyre and joins the Victorian Mounted Police but when he hears of Lilian Ayrlie's death of a broken heart he gives up and turns to dissipation, eventually returning to Scotland to die. In Australia he had become friends with the narrator's mother. Well written with a slight touch of the psychic. Very harmonious. (PB)

English family romance. Jennie Stanmore's practical joke played on her rich Aunt Jane loses her the lady's favour and an inheritance of £30 000, especially when her aunt discovers she is engaged to a young officer who displeases her. Jennie at last speaks out against her aunt's unfairness - and is left only a military portrait when her aunt dies. But the accidental breakage of the portrait reveals £25 000. Light pleasant romance with side references to Christian sects and the South African war. Warm sense of a lively family. (PB)

A young trooper is sent to watch a house in the Victorian bush - the tale is mysterious and oddly written for W. W. Includes an old police sergeant, a ramshackle hut that is in fact a brick house and garden, an aristocratic father and his beautiful daughter - who turns out to be his son, a sham funeral and an undertaker who is a forger ... (PB)

US frontier tale. Set on the Ohio River in 1805, a boatload of settlers are nearly lured to their deaths by a Red Indian decoy. The narrator is in fact captured but makes an escape later, foiling another attempt to decoy the other passengers. Interesting but mild style. (PB)

Romance between two distant cousins blossoms during a Cambridge student's convalescence at a Devon country estate. His discovery of the bones of one of her family's ancestors immured alive in 1649 is prompted by a dream - and assists him to win her heart. Slightly odd mixture of life and death, romance and ghosts ... (PB)

Humorous account of a painful boxing round with the narrator's younger brother. (PB)

Account of the narrator's meeting with his future wife at an English seaside town where he had been appointed curate. Mistaking her elderly aunt's house for his sister's, he crawled into the lounge draped in the hall rug and making bear noises to amuse her children! Slight, amusing. (PB)

On women's permanent wakefulness at night and the sounds they hear. (PB)

Weakly written romance of a poor English squire whose fall from his horse introduces him to an unknown family debtor - who restores his lost fortune and the young bride he thought he had lost to the rich old man. (PB)

The late French general's pledge of abstinence in his youth that saved him from execution for striking a superior officer. (PB)

A US army sergeant and five troopers sacrifice their lives to reveal that the Apache Indians they have been following have not been lost. (PB)

Advises the Lime-Kiln Club on exercising caution and sense in choosing a wife - not infatuation. (PB)