Cirrus@Austlit

On the various effects a heartfelt New Year's greeting may have on a suffering heart. (PB)

A father gambles with his dissolute son for his death and the family honour, near ruined by the young man's cheating at cards and his mother's indulgence. Heavy style. (PB)

Ghost tale. An American commercial traveller unable to find other lodgings in London spends a night in a haunted house where he sees a ghostly murderer dispose of his victim. The traveller is ill for several months with relatives before he can return to the US. (PB)

Satirical exposure of the injustices which can be worked through the English Law of Arrest for debt ... Told through person of a foreign merchant falsely arrested for debt to allow time for his debtor, and English ship's captain, to escape. (PB)

Forbearance and tact are the oil of social intercourse. (PB)

A banker's son chooses Christmas Day to confess to his parents that he is married and has a son. His expectations of anger are confounded when he discovers they already know of it. (PB)

Mr Fogg is completely ignored in choosing a suit. Humour. (PB)

Horror tale set in underground vaults, probably in Europe. Tells of the fiendish torture of the narrator by the evil Zaroni who is himself destroyed by the fate prepared for his victim. Includes an account of the terrible deaths of the narrator's parents and the ingenious employment of their remains in the narrator's sufferings. Macarbe and somewhat disjointed story; full of deformity and cruelly calculated revenge. (PB)

Blighted romance. Tennyson's poem reminds Margaret Wyeth of her own life, the death of her mother, and finally that of her lover, a soldier, who died of his wounds before she could arrive. Slight melancholy piece. (PB)

Anecdote of Frederick V, King of Denmark, and his humility with a class of village children. (PB)

Mock ghost tale and romance. The courtship of a doctor's daughter and her departure from her cheerful home to the home of her new husband (also a doctor.) On Christmas Eve she and her dying mother-in-law are scared by a 'ghost', which proves only to be the crashing of a broken clock. (PB)

A husband receives a bill for his Christmas presents. (PB)

Fratricide on a beautifully drained Victorian farm when a younger brother learns he is illegitemate and has no claim on his older brother's property to enable him to marry. Both love the same woman but when she marries the younger brother, though unaware of the murder, her happiness is disturbed by a ghost. Her father helps uncover the mystery and takes her home, leaving her husband to suicide. Includes a faithful dog and an untrustworthy murderous farmhand. (PB)

Dramatised account of the encounter at a dinner party of the historian and the future parliamentarian. (PB)

Alison Reece nearly loses her faithful gentlemanly farmer fiancee when an aristocratic youth flirts with her. She only realises her false pride when he falls over a cliff in a thick mist and, believing him dead, she suffers brain fever. Pleasantly predictable. (PB)

Thoughts on a child's death prompted by a stroll in a NSW country graveyard. Sentiment; mother-love etc. (PB)

A Liverpool merchant swindles a Jewish shipping firm of £20 000, and when their detective tracks him to Spain enjoys a pleasure trip at his expense before refusing to join him on a yachting trip - which would have returned him to England. Clever, humorous, slight. (PB)