Cirrus@Austlit

A clever cheerful Irishman wins a county seat in Parliament by his engaging personality, his advocacy of home rule, and his magnificent riding of a wild black mare to win the local steeplechase from behind. (PB)

A honeymoon in Paris for a comfortable English village couple turns sour when their prudent purse is stolen. When returned for a reward it is filled with forged English bank notes. (PB)

Defence of Michigan bridge for Custer's troops by a company of 60 men - reduced to 28 by the time re-enforcements arrive. (PB)

Country station setting. Bertha, widowed squatter's only daughter has her life disrupted by a strong gentlemanly new manager with whom she falls in love - despite being engaged to a neighbour's son. A season in Sydney and suspicions of the manager's relationship with her beautiful maid and foster sister Rose cannot banish him. The maid's disappearance and her ghostly visitation with her baby on the night she dies reveals that it is Bertha's fiancee who ruined her - so Bertha is free to marry her true stalwart lover ... Begins with a dingo hunt and descriptions of the beauty of the the Australian bush; brief reference to Shakespeare's Desdemona. (PB)

A father comforts his daughter over cigars accidentally left by her suitor - and reveals his own knowledge of courtship. (PB)

Humorous fable of the 'Turkish Aesop'. Nass-red-dyn whose wit and a gift of figs amuses the conqueror Tamerlane and gains the release of his friends. Misogynist element - ignores wife's advice. (PB)

Romantic tragedy. A small town clerk from Norfolk emigrates to Melbourne in 1882 and works himself up through country branches of a bank. In Echuca he meets and falls in love but cannot marry until his income increases. The death of an uncle gives him a small fortune, he returns and marries but three months later his wife runs off to the Cape with his best friend to whom he had just given thousands of pounds. The deserted husband's body is reported found in the Yarra by the Melbourne Evening Herald. (PB)

Account of a jury locked up overnight, their resentment, quarrels, sleeping arrangement and final dismissal by the Court next day. (PB)

English society romantic tragedy. An orphan raised by her heartless atheist step-mother amidst London's bohemian society marries a vicar only to leave him when she feels he has ceased to love her. She has a daughter, is a successful writer but longs for her husband - determining to return to him after being propositioned by a profligate. She hears that her husband will not receive her and abandons the child, committing suicide during a storm in a swollen stream ... (PB)

Gunfight between a marshal and a gunfighter he ordered to get out of town - showdown at high noon - an absurd mix of humour and bloody description with laconic townspeople. (PB)

Set on a country station. Sinclair and a foppish young detective are assigned separately to investigage a series of robberies. Dandy Art poses as a lady's man and enjoys the role until his flirtation with the squatter's daughter's lady's companion leads to his death at the hands of Quiet Alf, revenging himself on the Squatter with the companion's help for imprisoning his father. Quiet Alf dies too with shot's from Dandy's derringer. Extracts from Dandy's diary. (PB)

Mosquitoes disturb the sleep of a spoiled child at a seaside holiday house - she thinks it an angel bite. (PB)

A Texas-bound emigrant wagon train is wiped out in seconds by a cyclone which passes by their camp on the Red River. Vultures and the hand of fate. Observed by the narrator. (PB)

An Italian mental specialist in Turin is robbed of his most valuable antiquities by a pair of English thieves who pretend to be an American banker and his wife. The banker claims she is a kleptomaniac. (PB)

An elderly woman arranges for her blase nephew to meet a charming girl - but he professes a preference for tea and flirtation with the sophisticated Mrs Laton and her set. The entry of the charming girl and his secret observation of her as she criticised Mrs Laton's gatherings as insipid and stupid initiate anger then attraction. (PB)