Cirrus@Austlit

Tale of the prodigal son in an Australian setting. The arrival of a poor woman and her child at an old man's residence warms the old serving woman's heart and they stay, the mother to help with the housework. The child wins the old man's affections and teaches him to be open to his long absent son who is her father and in gaol. She dies soon after he is released but father and son are reconciled, and the judgements of the faithful old servant reproved. Competently written though predictable plot. Characterisation of old servant best. (PB)

Nautical tale including the supernatural. Set in the 1860s on a voyage from Jamaica to Georgetown in British Guiana, on a British brig. The ship's bell tolls at midnight, it's strokes predicting the age of the man to die that night. After three nights the crew mutinies but their longboat is never found - the captain alone survives. Well-written. (PB)

Set along the Mississippi in 1838. A brave US lieutenant wins the spirited English traveller Lady Cecil Gray when he saves her life during an attempt to wrest a French flag from a near insurmountable bluff. Light, well-paced. (PB)

An elderly lawyer in Ajaccio, France, explains why he never gambles - describing a brief encounter in the 1860s in the courtroom with a murderer to whom he owed a debt of honour ... Brief, well-sustained. (PB)

A poor family is blessed by the happy baby it can ill afford - and then it dies. Piety but not overwhelming. (PB)

A scheming English lawyer loses an inheritance from a rich client when the same vanishing ink is used to make her will which he concocted to write love letters to the old lady's companion ... Light; nice twist of the plot. (PB)

Tale of the Civil War. A sergeant persecuted by his lieutenant has to desert from their Dalton camp to visit his dying daughter - and is tracked and killed at the officer's instigation. Revenge follows with his death in battle ... Simple tale of feeling in war. (PB)

An artist and his friend are joined on their camping trip to Gippsland by an old acquaintance of bad reputation recently returned from the South African diamond mines. He takes lodgings at a small cottage, falls in love with the 'widowed' owner and gambles with her dissipated 'brother' and disappears along with his diamonds ... Female murdress and weak male ... (PB)

A colonel in the US is punished in his second marriage for his hardness to his first wife. (PB)

Anecdotes of the generosity and sagacity of the English Grant Brothers - immortalised by Dickens as the 'Cheeryble Brothers'. (PB)

Father and child on a US train are accompanying their dead wife and mother on her last journey. Pathos. (PB)