AustLit

Brummell enjoys a landlord's repast but can not afford to pay for it. Humour. (PB)

Slight English romance. Two cousins discover they love the same man and Florence sacrifices her own happiness that the other may marry the man who truly loves her. Death follows. (PB)

US anecdote of a husband's successful attempt to avoid his wife's eye as she waited up for him to come home. (PB)

A youth sentenced to death in Dalton USA in 1864 for deserting the Confederate army is reprieved at the last moment but not before he has gone mad. Sketchy; some immediacy. (PB)

A one-legged parishioner tells his vicar the story of his life as the son of a drunkard, working hard on the streets of London and then on the railway where he saves a train of people after coming back from his first religious meeting. Pithy, humorous and with an eye for the injustice of a Christian company overworking its employees. (PB)

Origin of the weeping willow in a bud gleamed from garden clippings by a poor small child. Pathos of sentimental variety. (PB)

Tale of a French prison, escape, and killing in self-defence. Tale of French convict sentenced for conspiring against the government recalls his years chained to a desperate counterfeiter, their escape, and his battle for life when they meet accidentally as lamplighters in the dome of St Peters in Rome. Tale of action; odd conclusion. (PB)

English ghost tale and romance. A major in the service of George III spends a night at a retired Colonel's country house, proves a ghost to be the colonel's daughter sleepwalking and marries her. Slight, jaunty. (PB)

Domestic tale. A wife's procrastination in caring for her small tasks costs her husband a £5000 inheritance when he misses his train. Slight; tediously exemplary. (PB)

Two lovers part when a dying mother extracts a promise from them both that her son shall marry the penniless daughter of her own true love, an artist she forsook for a rich man. It takes five years to discover that she is the artist's daughter, adopted by another. (PB)

A picket counts sentinels on the battlefield and finds one corpse too many, thus sealing his own and the regiment's fate. Impressionistic. (PB)

Sinclair is attracted to the beautiful daughter of a partially paralysed overland owner, Moyra Prout, but she is engaged to the dubious Ned Crofton. When Crofton is hunted for forgery she helps him hide in the orchard's cider press and repulses Sinclair, but finds crofton has murdered her father. He is hanged and she enters a convent! (PB)

English romance incorporating racing stratagems and legal technicalities. A fast living but honest nobleman seeks to redeem his debts through a horse race and thus marry Alice Wardle, but his rival seeks to use legalities to prevent him. Light.(PB)

Hearty sailor's yarn of a peccary caught by the Irish crew of the 'Galway' off San Francisco and the disruption it caused to pigs and crew aboard. Humorous and sprightly tale. (PB)

Eighteen years after his house was built a man paints it - his wife has died and so they no longer disagree on colours. (PB)

English tale of love's vengeance. A paralysed woman tells her niece of the pain of her youth when she discovered her fiancee loved her scheming cousin, the rupture of their engagement and his re-engagement to the cousin. A lightning flash is all that prevents her burning her cousin in her bridal robes. Thin; bizarre ending - the cousin's stratagems well depicted. (PB)

A colloquial touch for a funeral arrangement. Humour. (PB)

Science Fantasy. An ingenious megaphone allows a Tasmanian and his uncle, a returned detective and landlord of a hotel near Melbourne, to listen to and be heard by people at a distance - including a group of criminals and a Cup race. Generally unabsorbing. (PB)

Domestic drama. A husband and wife quarrel and separate over his refusal to allow her brother to come and live with them. Her pride is vanquished after several months, especially when she learns of her brother's weakness, and she writes asking his forgiveness ... (PB)

Light summer romance. Four young women and their mother go by train to the country house rented for a month by their father. After making themselves at home for the day they discover they are in the wrong house. (PB)