AustLit

A London businessman's unhappy experience with a pretty 'type-writer' and an unexpected visit from his wife. (PB)

A rural banker's son hesitates to declare his love to a beautiful hospital nurse holidaying in the village who his status-conscious sisters disapprove of. Twice he proves his courage lacking - in a dogfight and with a runaway bicycle; and he loses her to Captain Hardwicke, heir to a title. (PB)

Bertha Adams, 33 and lady's companion to Hon. Mrs Hamlyn Vipont accompanies her and her invalid son Edgar to Australia for his health. Though considering herself very practical she becomes - through a psychologist and exponent of mesmerism and the occult, Professor Drayton, the means of discovering the death of Edgar's former love and finds a letter written to him by the girl before her suicide ... She sees the young woman's ghost and hears Edgar's tale before he too dies. Atmosphere of self-concealment and the occult, Brontesque in parts. (PB)

Romance between two cousins who grew up together results in self-sacrifice as they become nun and priest as their parents promised for them ... Later he discovers his cousin had died before him but leaves a message in her work. (PB)

Three miners, a Cornishman, a Spanish Indian and a young American go prospecting for gold in Colorado in 1850. Tired of fruitless digging the American is abandoned by the other two down the mine shaft - and he contrives a rope to escape. A few feet from the top it parts ... (PB)

A poorer man takes advantage of a richer, handsomer and more popular friend's heroism to win his consent to sacrifice the woman he loves to the poorer uglier friend's need. Years of friendship follow the marriage until an accident down a Welsh coal mine reveals the arrangement to the woman and she castigates the 'hero' for his arrogance which ruined their love ... (PB)

An English major, an adventurer in Paris, secures a comfortable widow by challenging his three rivals to a duel and marrying her while they are travelling to the appointed meeting place. (PB)

White-Aboriginal encounter on an isolated North Australian station. After long waiting for the attack, and staving off the 'blacks' for a time, the young husband shoots his wife to save her from a fate worse than death. A constable rescues him almost immediately - but it is too late. (PB)

A new bridegroom's suspicions of his wife's correspondence are finally settled when he discovers the letters are from her dentist concerning her false teeth. (PB)

A city boarding house and a tight-fisted old landlady with 'Jewish blood' murders one of her tenants for the 600 pounds in gold he had stolen from his employers, a building society. Her guilt is established with the help of a fellow boarder, of Detective Binge, and the victim's fiancee, an actress with whom he had planned to elope. Elements: apparent suicide, transient ghost; actress subsequently becomes a female detective officer in the force. (PB)

Tragedy in the Bunyip Hotel on the Melbourne-Sale track in 1869 and the middle 70s. The kind-hearted owners of the hotel shelter their servant when she is pregnant, deserted by her lover. She dies, leaving a letter with the local priest, and the couple raise her child. Warm tale of simple people and human charity. Purportedly true; includes visit to 'Little Jim' in mid-70s. (PB)

French sketch of a practical joke played on a Cahors gentleman and a Toulouse notary over a supposed inheritance from a pork butcher in Chicago. (PB)