Cirrus@Austlit

Two Prussian soldiers are pardoned when the dice refuse to condemn them. (PB)

Humourous defence of the horse. Advocates studying them from a North Carlton cab.

Light romance. An accident involving a fallen mirror at a ball reveals to estranged lovers the plot that has separated them, formed by a jealous cousin. The hero is a doctor. (PB)

King Athelstan of England trusts a dream in selecting the hero to fight against the champion of the invading Danes in 926. His faith is rewarded. Folk tale. (PB)

A Roman boy proves his loyalty to the Senate and his mother's inability to keep a secret. Ancient Rome. (PB)

English romance. Love blossoms eventually between a poor curate and a governess turned heiress to her rich Australian uncle. A practical joke proposing marriage is at first humiliating but eventually provokes the intimacy that leads to love. Includes a picture of the hard life a governess may lead. Told through two narrators. (PB)

A gambler's charity in his youth is used by a friend to save him from disgrace when he is older and tempted by poverty to dishonesty. Interesting sentiments competently written; shows hypocrisy of the respectable. (PB)

US romance. A bachelor spends Christmas at the house of his Boston friend and meets his wife and sister-in-law. He is infatuated at once but is very perturbed on his friend's behalf when he sees the wife steal into his room at night and take his jewellery. An explanation of somnambulism puts him on close terms with his beloved. Slight. (PB)

Anecdote of Pope Alexander VI and the Venetian builder who prompts him to feed the poor rather than build a palace. (PB)

A girl's promise to her mother not to marry anyone of 'intemperate habits' saves the man she loves from alcohol and turns him into a temperance lecturer. Exemplary tale; weak. (PB)

A young traveller on the express train to the US east coast sits beside an old man accompanying his wife's body for burial in Maine and hears the tale of their long faithful love. Sentimental but folksy, moving. (PB)

English actors Bass and Kean confuse their roles during a performance of Othello - due to a little alcoholic indulgence. (PB)

Humorous description of the uses of the front gate in encouraging romance. (PB)

A woman recounts an hour spent alone as a girl in her parents' house, trying to escape an intruder. Her tom-boy habits stand her in good stead and she finally shoots him in the leg. Tension. (PB)

Pleasant divertingly sharp romance. A handsome lieutenant of artillery decides to be kind to a young woman sitting alone at a ball - but in the course of a tete-a-tete she so charms him that he proposes and she accepts. He spends the rest of the night regretting his impulse, she dancing with others, until she reveals she accepted his proposal to teach him care and discretion, and releases him from the engagement. (PB)

Sir Colin returns to his Highland castle after many years when he was believed dead, to reclaim his wife on the eve of her wedding to a neighbour who has plotted against him. (PB)

Slight, occasionally peculiar. The nephew of a rich but obstinate man quarrels with his uncle when he refuses to allow him to marry a poor young governess. The girl and the uncle meet and he adopts her without knowing of her relation to his nephew - and encourages the very match he sought to avoid ... (PB)

An inventor's trial of his submarine apparatus ends in his death due to his female relative's quarrels. (PB)

A professor's young wife disobeys his injunction that she should not attend a lecture on 'Women's Rights' and her friend Hettie minds the house while she goes. This deceit is complicated further when a soldier enamoured of Hettie enters the house, and a dramatist over the road feels compelled to inform the professor ... All ends happily in this comedy of errors; slightly overdone. The women's rights lecture is of course 'nonsense'. (PB)