AustLit

A misunderstanding interrupts a romance on All Hallow's Eve but is cleared up a week later when another engagement reveals all. Set in northern hemisphere. (PB)

Family tragedy as a farmer informs on a bushranger and fires his daughter's lover so that he will join the bushranger and be captured likewise. The daughter resolves to warn her lover and so meets her long-lost brother and mother after a wild night-time scramble across country to their hut. Interesting portrait of the daughter. (PB)

US tale. The purchase of a horse and a coat nearly cost the narrator his life when he is mistaken for a horse thief - until he is rescued by a pretty woman. (PB)

A Christmas Day excursion of young Melbourne clerks and ladies to Mount Macedon in December 1873 concludes with an agreement to meet there again in five years time. The narrator is the only one faithful to the promise - Pleasant. (PB)

A husband's indignant treatment of his wife who secretly sews a mustard plaster to his undershirt, burning his chest. (PB)

A little girl dreams of a fairy who helps her find coral and pearls to sell to rich ladies so she can help her mother and friends. Instead she uses the money to buy fine clothes - and the fairy refuses to help her again. A lesson learnt. (PB)

Town gossips determined to correct the local telegraph operator for reputed moral laxity are confronted by two yong men taking her place while she is on holdiays. Colloquial, predictable. (PB)

A poor but good-natured dressmaker's habit of exaggeration leads to her own and her fiancee's arrest for stealing a watch - and to her reformation. Slight. (PB)

An Irish lord's servant accosts the local banshee and silences her shriekings for a night, gaining her promise to leave the country, and saving his master's life. Lively folk narrative. (PB)

A new man-servant reminds a happily-married doctor of his wife's first husband - but before his suspicions can be proved the man dies saving the doctor's step-children from a fire. Slight, plain appeal. (PB)

A handsome man flirts away a summer with a young girl, breaking her heart. Six years later she has become a beautiful woman and his love for her is treated as indifferently as hers had been. (Interesting in that a woman's coolness is not overtly condemned.) (PB)

A faithful husband nursing his wife is driven at last to hope for her death but she recovers to prove to him how loving she could be. Slight. (PB)

A timid woman travelling to the north of England is locked in a railway carriage with two gentlemen - an old and a young man - who begin to discuss plots, murders etc. Terrified she seeks a guard's assistance at the first stop - only to hear them say they were discussing a plot for a weekly newspaper serial. A little overdrawn. (PB)

Anecdote of 1848; a Venetian danseuse who displayed her patriotism in the treatment of bouquets thrown to her on stage. (PB)

Answers to a London public schools examination showing the ignorance of the students. Colloquial; phonetic spelling. (PB)

On Australia's connections to the Christmas traditions of England. (PB)

Vanity of dress and of personal appearance need to be squashed at their first appearance. (PB)