AustLit

A Scotch maid does not recognise a tortoise. (PB)

A young artist is commissioned to paint a portrait of a rich German Jew's dead father without any picture to go by. He pays attention to the details and the purchaser accepts it with the observation that his father had changed since his death. (PB)

Domestic humour as parents, maid and doctor panic, fearing the baby has swallowed a button which is in fact under the fender. Baby sees them as a lot of lunatics. (PB)

Romance and tragedy of the rich. Fifine, a respectable shop girl is seduced into a false marriage by the apparently respectful courtship of Pierre Lenoir. He abandons her and she marries a faithful stonemason after giving up her child Cecile to an aristocratic couple. She visits the girl anonymously over the years, and when she learns Cecile is to be forced into a marriage with the sickly highly-strung son of a nobleman she finally intervenes to prevent it. She reveals to the father of Cecile's unwanted suitor that he is also Cecile's father and to prevent incest they must not marry. The son dies of his disappointed hopes and Cecile finally marries the rising solicitor she loves. Subtext of growing independence of lower classes from tyranny of aristocrats. (PB)

Love between an organist/Sunday school teacher and a local gentleman. A joint horseback ride to escape a pursuing cow, and an encounter at a small town, conceit leading to a muddy walk in a bog and a proposal, cement this romance. (PB)

Mr Gladstone recalls a fight from his youth with another lad over stolen strawberries. (PB)

A 'clothing man's' advertisements for his trousers are questioned by a seedy customer. (PB)

Life, history and romance of a motherless English girl, orphaned with her brother after their father's death. A little wild, she had rebelled strongly against her step-mother and had taken the opportunity of a 100 pound inheritance to emigrate to Australia. She is befriended by a kindly gentleman at Liverpool before she leaves and by a lady on the voyage out who cares for her for a while then assists her to gain a position as governess. Five years after her arrival she fulfils a promise to write to the kind stranger at Liverpool. A year elapses before his reply, letters are exchanged, romance blossoms, and he arrives in Victoria to claim her as his bride. Sense of a naive dreaming spirit befriended by luck. (PB)

Romance of a youth enamoured of a girl who loves another. He is freed of his infatuation when a practical joke by his fellow office clerks causes him to stand waiting in her garden during a three hour downpour, and to be shot in the arm trying to elope with her, and to catch fever from both. She marries her other suitor, the narrator marries his cousin and inherits a share in his uncle's business thereby. (PB)

Set on a former diggings site in 1879, the return of a farmer's digging mate of 1859 coincides with the return of the murderer of another digger working there that year in the guise of a swagman. A patiently vengeful brother and grave-carer; a ghost of the dead man; a simple-minded girl whose obsession with the murder leads to her death and her parents' grief; golden treasure buried in the grave-yard and a death-bed confession. (PB)

Tale of a broken romance, theft of gold and the discovery of Golden Reef. As a young man on the Jericho goldfields in 1859 the narrator fell in love with a local store servant cum bar maid. He tells her when he taking is his gold to a nearby town for sale but only discovers later, after she has accompanied him and helped the bushranger Captain Melville steal the gold, that she has betrayed him. In searching for his stolen gold he stumbles across a gold-bearing quartz rock and discovers the incredibly rich Golden Reef. Story claims to be factual with only names changed. (PB)