AustLit

A country visit in England in 1864 results in the narrator accepting a bet to spend a night alone in a reputedly haunted house. He witnesses the ghostly murder of a small boy and is found in the morning with a head wound and judged insane for several months. Some time later he revisits the house when it is being renovated and uncovers the boy's skeleton in a secret room in the cellar. (PB)

Light rhyming nonsensical prose on an imaginary visit to the country from the city. Nursery-rhyme like. (PB)

A detective on the hunt for counterfeiters stumbles across them accidentally at a tavern he is staying at. He is caught spying on them but saves himself by pretending to be the best 'coiner' in the country - with three prize counterfeit coins in his pocket. Crime adventure. (PB)

Tale of temptation. Reginald Wellingford is begged by his fiancee to give up his gambling and when he realises that he will be ruined if the horse he backed loses the next race and he would then have to renounce his engagement as a matter of honour, he thanks her as his guardian angel. A rival suitor bribes the formerly honest jockey to lose the race and thus ruin Reginald, but when Reginald saves the jockey's son from being run over by a train the jockey listens to his son- his guardian angel, and rides to win. (PB)

A Scottish doctor finds an assistant by testing the boys' nerves with ventriloquism and a skull. (PB)

Legend said to account for wearing orange blossoms at weddings. An orange tree given to a Spanish king by an African prince is guarded until a gardener accidentally breaks off a piece and gives it to his daughter. A foreign ambassador buys it at such a high sum that she is enabled to marry. (PB)

Tale of romantic disillusion. A young man loves a lady he rescued at a seaside village but is broken when she reveals she is not a widow as he presumed, but married. Her holiday flirtataion darkens his life - and she feels a little ashamed.

A farmer lost his farm to a boyhood friend turned enemy through their rivalry for the same woman's affections. The farmer and his wife died soon after, leaving their son Tom to work alone. Some time later the new farm owner hanged himself and left a mysterious message in his pocket in code. Tom finds it and years later with his friend the narrator he follows its deciphered instructions and digs up a tin box with a false bottom which contains a will leaving all the suicide's money to Tom. The friend's experience includes mistaking a white cow for a ghost and falling in a ditch. (PB)

Tale of a London clerk who loses his position when his Portuguese trading company fails. He resolves to shoot himself but to shoot his dog first - then discovers he has used the only bullet in the gun on his dog. In his frustrated walk back to his boarding house he encounters a friend who offers his the very job he needs. His dog saved his life and he honours the anniversary of its death each year. (PB)

The owner of the local manor house is about to return after years of working to pay off his inherited debts. A stranger comes to stay at a local cottage to superintend the works and falls in love with the daughter. She refuses him but he later agrees to help her father out of a debt ... Time and separation passes until the couple meet again at a seaside village, she refuses a dashing captain because she loves him and they are married. When they return to her home from Paris she discovers he is the lord of the manor ... (PB)

A young wife and her friend decide to check up on a newspaper advertisement for a wife to go to the colonies with - apparently made by the wife's husband. Such seems to be the case - when halfway through he reveals that he has seen through his wife's disguise, and that the ad was for his friend. The two friends marry and go to Australia. (PB)

A near penniless city lawyer is promised $100 000 if he marries a beautiful and mysterious young client. He agrees after discovering it is to frustrate her marriage to a hated man - but by then he is in love with her anyway. They stay together. (PB)

A female friend turns a quarrelling woman back to her fiancee by stressing his bad points and prompting her to defend him. (PB)

Tale of two English sisters raised by their miserly and tyranical uncle. One leaves home to marry a poor doctor, and suffers as the uncle refuses to help support them. Her elder sister is loved by a poor cousin, whom she refuses to marry, as she wants a life of comfort. On his deathbed her uncle discovers her nature and leaves all to her young sister. Two letters in the plot. Comfort-loving sister settles in the USA with her cousin. (PB)

A policeman traces two burglars through a diamond ring and a foraging cap left at the scene of the crime - and a judicious advertisement placed in the paper combined with a tavern-keeper's testimony. (PB)

A jewellery commercial traveller is swindled of £800 on his first rounds in Scotland. He accepts the sum as payment from the son of a client on behalf of his father - but is approached that night by an old man claiming the notes paid were his son's forgeries and offering 'genuine' ones in their place. These are the forgeries however and the traveller is himself arrested before his innocence can be proved. (PB)

A husband's smart reply to his wife that his seeds won't come up is proven mistaken when the neighbour's hens dig them up. (PB)

A husband and his brother-in-law resolve to steal the diamonds belonging to the former's wife - also the latter's sister - to pay their gambling debts. She outfoxes them on their railway trip and contrives to get her father to give them the necessary money. (PB)

A dancing master, penniless widower and father of eight, is persuaded to take a mysterious child across the border from Germany to France disguised as one of his sons. They escape detection and he discovers later he has helped return a kidnapped duke to his grieving mother. (PB)

Michael Bairdy alias Detective Sommerville is hired to nurse an invalid gentleman and discovers poisoning, attempts to find the location of hidden diamonds from the sick man; a helpful house boy who is a runaway son of the invalid; a cook assisting her master/secret husband to drug his brother; a double-cross and the murder of the scheming brother. Several narrative voices. (PB)