Cirrus@Austlit

An encounter between a lodger and a burglar in a coastal lodging house near Sydney reunites brothers separated when the spoiled young and slightly wilder brother left their Melbourne home for wandering to NZ and California, hurrying the deaths of their parents. Suspense maintained to the end. (PB)

A 16 year-old girl is determined never to marry but to remain single and self-reliant. Then she meets the brother of a lately-married friend and he is so unlike all other men that she changes her mind. (PB)

A mother sympathises over-indulgently with her son's illness; his father beats him for smoking cigars. (PB)

Accounts of the beauty of Ireland's Limerick lasses; the excitment caused by the postings of various regiments there; marriages made by Limerick belles; and a fatal steeplechase which killed an officer and shattered the reason of his beautiful fiancee - another Limerick belle. (PB)

The end of a holiday flirtation for an inconstant young man does not run to form - when the woman whom he felt idolised him reveals that she too is tired of him. Both desire only what they cannot have. (PB)

A female state school teacher's ruse for making it appear to the principal that her class was very well taught - a signal in the raising of hands lets her class know which boys know the answer. (PB)

Domestic tragedy of newly arrived immigrants to Australia. Mary Leicester is left alone by the death of her husband three weeks after their arrival in Melbourne. The tale depicts her grief and solitariness; the kindness of the landlady's widowed sister; the comfort of her cat and the visitation of her husband's spirit after his funeral and before his rich squatter uncle comes to claim her. Slight with sketches of common human nature and a touch of comfort of the spirit - which the cat is aware of. (PB)

Murder is committed by a spendthrift discontented Victorian country trooper who wants a hawker's gold to pay his passage money back to England - money his sister refuses to pay on behalf of his poor, dying mother. A shearer's evidence, a life-preserver as murder weapon and a head trooper's suspicions conclude the tale. (PB)

Civil War story. A Captain is blinded by a shell during the hopeless Union army attack on Lee's impregnable stonghold at Fredericksburg. (PB)