Cirrus@Austlit

The actor-dramatist becomes a member of a circulating library - doesn't borrow a book ... but gives an oath. Humour. (PB)

A father's thirst for vengeance against the rejected suitor who poisoned his daughter and nephew the week before their wedding is more than satisfied by discovering the murderer mouldering in a San Francisco house - a LEPER! Ponderous and involuted tale of murder and divine justice. (PB)

A waiter's quick response to a complaint about the freshness of a pie. Humour. (PB)

The touches of human emotion glimpsed from the wharves of the Yarra as steamers depart for overseas. (PB)

Domestic tale. A Melbourne bank clerk forcibly posted to India leaves his delicate and pregnant wife in Australia. Five years later he has never seen his child, Maude, when he is summoned home by a mysterious event. On the ship he grows attached to a young orphan - who he discovers in Melbourne is his own daughter, kidnapped in San Francisco. (PB)

Schoolboys' attempts to guess their teacher's required response. (PB)

Narrative, purportedly based on fact, of the construction of a very secure safe, its purchase by a diamond firm in Natal, and eventual use in an elaborate robbery. Factual base very close to surface but still sufficiently rendered to make it more than a simple report. (PB)

Set in a widow's house on the coast. A young widow and her son come as winter lodgers in an elderly widow's house and the advent of an old admirer convinces the young woman to marry again - though her heart was buried with her drowned sailor husband. A stranger resuces her son only days before the wedding - and proves to be her husband miraculously rescued. The former suitor disappears but anonymously sends them £1000 to help them settle in Australia. (PB)

A careless second wife is given a lesson in mothering her step-child by her predecessor's ghost. (PB)

A childless couple adopt a foundling but he dies of scarlet fever while still a child. Pathos. (PB)

Dramatised incidents from the courtship and marriage of the King and Queen of Italy. (PB)

Romance between a Dakota doctor and a Mennonite nurse. They meet when a young Russian Mennonite boy is injured and he proposes when she runs to him to ask how she may live in 'the world' as she does not wish to marry. She does marry him - to assist in his work and care for him, and he is happy (she 'reflects' his glory.) (PB)

The social rules a man should live by, not the exaggerated duty and worries the churches would lay on. (PB) Series of regular aricles published in the Detroit Free Press by Charles Bertrand Lewis. Also published in book form, under the pseudonym M. Quad, as Brother Gardner's Lime-kiln club, being the regular proceedings of the regular club for the last three years. With some philosophy, considerable music, a few lectures, and a heap of advice worth reading. Not compiled in the interest of Congress, or any department of government.(Chicago, Belford, Clark & Co.,1882)

Phillip Northcote, the proud middle-aged master of a rich Australian station, asks his friend Dr Clayton to investigate the ghost of his father reported near the mausoleum the old man had erected for his burial place but was ignored by his son. The doctor and the old gardener suspect the girl of hiding a man there - and Northcote follows her and shoots her 'accidentally' when he discovers them together. It is her brother, a wanted criminal, whom she meets. Innocence betrayed and murdered by man's rigid pride. (PB)

Tale of revenge between sisters in London society. A pretty up-and-coming London hostess who has discarded her own Jewishness is determined her older dark large-nosed sister shall not attend a select costume ball she is arranging. Her sister's wrath at being refused an invitation takes a very cruel revenge - as none of the promised beauties appear and the men are left to dance alone ... A disappointed visit from Royalty completes the humiliation. Nice study of social pretension and apposite revenge. (PB)

Set on the coast. The pretty high-spirited daughter of a shop owner in a Queensland holiday town has to be betrayed by the man she trusts and lose her parents and her child to death before she learns the value of faithful, loving 'colonial' Ned. He earns a fortune on the far North Queensland goldfields and returns to woo her when he hears from her seducer of his iniquity. Familiar plot, easy style, but Jessie's ability to win back the respect of the townspeople and find married happiness is still unusual in these tales. (PB)

A farmer tries his luck in the boxing ring before deciding to confront a 'sassy' hired man. Humour, probably US. (PB)

A lone woman captures a murderer in a bear trap. Left alone with her child when her husband goes to market Mrs Upson set a clever trap in the cellar for a violent intruder. Straightforward narrative. (PB)

Examples of persons under excitement not feeling pain. A captain of a fishing schooner eventually dies of a sword-fish wound he did not at first feel. (PB)

Romance and misadventure on the Cornish coast, narrated by the local vicar. A lovers' quarrel ends in the young woman's fall over a cliff - and a change of murder is only averted when she is found in a subterranean passage. (PB)