AustLit

A steeplejack's daughter's cool head for heights enables her to save her father's life. Set in an English village. (PB)

The youthful narrator's attentions to a young lady crossing the Atlantic from Liverpool on the same ship gives him embarrassment when she is exposed as a male bank robber. And the annoying second-class passenger is in fact a police detective who disappears overboard one night - a possible murder victim. Well-controlled narrative voice of youthful naivety. (PB)

A London wholesale druggist invites a number of chemists to dine with him and finds none will sit down with the other. (PB)

A bank clerk in Yorkshire takes £22 000 home with him through a series of misadventures. He and his wife are giving a party and later that night his coat and the money are stolen. He finds it eventually at the pawnbrokers. Light humour. (PB)

How a businessman is ruined by his wife's extravagance in keeping up appearances [in the form on an address to a lodge.] (PB)

The tale of gentle old Miss Margaret's 'life' told the day after her funeral - really of her girlhood, her romance, the death of her lover from diptheria, and the gentle quiet sadness of the rest of her days alone. (Interesting from a general equation that a woman's life is romance). (PB)

From the US, a Medford Clergyman's sermon on the number who will be 'saved' causes dispute among his flock. (PB)

Humorous romance. A forty year-old Englishman receives a letter from his uncle with an ultimatum that he marry the widowed grandmother on the adjoining property. He meets a beautiful woman in her thirties and despairs of having her - until he discovers she and grandmother are one. Light. (PB)

A sisterly scheme introduces the determinedly unattached Will Blayne to the truly womanly Florence Sherman, and through studied neglect of her friend attaches his interests and affections to her. Slight romance. (PB)

Practical joke played while fishing. (Probably USA). (PB)

Ellen O'Slattery escapes from Melbourne gaol around 1882 after serving most of a life sentence for murdering in jealousy a friend of her's who John Boyle had laughed with. Her mad revenge causes her to seek out Boyle who is about to marry ... Strongly atmospheric, the curse of Cain etc. (PB)

An accountant who has given up all thoughts of romance to support his widowed mother and siblings falls in love with the daughter of an old friend, left to him as ward. After severe struggles with himself and thinking her in love with his brother, her love is his. Pleasant. (PB)

Childhood romance in Yorkshire, where "Lioness" fetches and carries Bob's fishing lines, becomes adult love - once Bob's true identity is clarified. Light, slightly silly English romance. (PB)

An 'idle' young nephew is ensconced in the formerly closed up wing of his doting aunt's house - and has a dream/vision of a negro attempting to kill him in the very same room where an ancestor had been murdered. He persuades his aunts to pull the wing down and in the process discovers a secret passage, a skeleton and £40 000 in gold. Very common sense ghost tale - well told. (PB)

Piously sentimental tale of an American woman visiting an English school friend who meets the local minister during a visit to a poor girl's deathbed - and discovers in him the true love she has lost through worldliness a few years earlier. Ugh! (PB)

A proud woman engaged to a cynical rich man to satisfy her aunt's and her own ambitions learns true love during a seaside holiday from the man who teaches her to row and saves her life. (Fortunately, he proves to be a gentleman 'roughing it'.) (PB)

British commercial travellers who gathered after a hotel dinner hear a tale from an old traveller of the hard old days - or rather of a practical joke played in 1842 on another traveller. The next morning he discovers that the butt of his joke years before has his revenge. Slight; unusual subject. (PB)

Our rise in circulation, new machinery for printing etc. Largely self-congratulatory trimph over old rivals. (PB)