AustLit

Domestic humour. A servant's question to dinner guests prompts them to take hock rather than the inferior sherry. (PB)

A police-sergeant's prosecution falls apart when his witness confesses to being single. Partly in dramatic form - dialogue in court. (PB)

A meeting between the narrator and an Irish ex-soldier with a mutilated hand recalls the latter's time in India in the 1860s. After avenging the death of his fiancee at the hands of Sepoy mutineers by killing many Indians, a hand wound leaves him unfit for service. In 1864 he meets the narrator on an England-bound ship. The sergeant disappears in the English Channel after an apparent attack on a Hindu servant on board whom he had attacked once before. Later in New York when they meet again, further violence ensues. (PB)

A doctor advises a patient to pursue a very abstemious life - in order to pay his medical bills. (PB)

Two young men on their way to Paris meet on a stage-coach - one a nobleman's son about to enter the army; the other a merchant's son about to get married. The latter dies and the nobleman decides to go and inform his fiancee's family of his death - but when he arrives cannot bear to break the news. He eats and at the end of the meal announces he is a ghost. The family learns their prospective son-in-law is dead and their daughter goes into mourning. She is soon comforted when the 'ghost' reappears and proposes. Whimsical. (PB)

A telegraph operator and his wife in a small town on the Pacific Railroad are imprisoned by thieves who have rolled a rock onto the line of an express train to wreck it and rob the gold it carries. The wife escapes and rides through a storm to the next town to give the alarm. She arrives back on a train filled with police. Her reward - a silver tea service! (PB)

A wife telegraphs her husband from London as agreed. He promptly writes back and tells not to wire from Switzerland. Peculiar. (PB)

A bush-fire at the Mia Mia diggings causes the death of beautiful little Jessie, daughter of a couple who live in a log cabin, and innocent charmer of the local miners. The cabin is spared, the mother badly burnt and Jessie feared drowned in a mine shaft. Her mother dies soon after ... the masculine miners are moved to tears. (PB)

A jealous wife's plan to test her husband's faithfulness is betrayed by her own handwriting. (PB)

Melodramatic romance. Two friends are rivals for the same woman. She accepts Hal's proposal. The rivals go climbing together and are captured by brigands who agree to let one go to bring back a ransom and to shoot his friend if he does not reappear. Hal stays - but his rival decides to let him be shot and tells the girl he is already dead. The chief agrees to let Hal go to discover if his friend is false or dead before he returns. Hal proves him false; the chief lets him off and kills the treacherous rival; the brigand's honour is nobler than the Englishman's. (PB)

A London business gentleman is visited in his office and pursued into his railway carriage and on his country holiday journey by a girl claiming to be a habitual criminal sent to him by the police for reform. She finally leaves him for a small bribe - until he discovers she is his host's daughter. (PB)

An Irish detective discovers a notoriously successful burglar in a well-received social family of a mother, brothers, two sisters and the elder brother's wife. A trap baited with some thousands of pounds is set in a conversation while riding - and it works. (PB)

A woman plots to use a house for mental patients as a means of delaying a jeweller while she decamped with his diamonds. Her ruse is frustrated however when the doctor recognises her beneath her disguises as an English noblewoman and the wife who deserted him for crime years before. (PB)

Narrated by a father to his three daughters in the 1890s, a romantic tragedy of the 1870s. A young clerk falls in love and proposes to the girl he saved from a runaway wagon whilst recovering from his injuries at her house. He is sent away on business shortly before their wedding and she meets and falls in love with a handsome talented fellow-violinist. They renounce each other and she marries her fiancée, bearing three children and deep sadness. To recover her health a trip to NZ is taken where she sees her true love, a drunken but genius musician. On their return trip he saves her husband, herself and their children when the ship flounders, they being temporarily reunited in the sea. He dies on the rocks and she shortly after ... The tale is told by the widowed husband, sure of his wife's love though aware it was also directed elsewhere. Well-written generally. (PB)

A rich man bids his wife buy the best family tree available from a florist or nurseryman. Ignorance of the nouvea riche.(PB)

A man's purchase of a bicycle is commented on by all his neighbours, who also test it out, compare makes etc until he is too tired to ride it himself. (PB)

A trooper postd to a small bush town becomes involved in a dispute between the arrogant unwomanly squatter's daughter and an outspoken bossy shanty-keeper's wife. He refuses to have the shanty removed and a confrontation between the women leads to the near-murder of one and the madness of the other. Hen-pecked husband and father also figure [and W. W. declares herself to be no proponent of women's rights.] (PB)

On parental resentment caused by the demands and crying of children in the night - and the inconsolable grief if a child's voice is heard no more, that is, if it dies. (PB)