AustLit

Anecdote of an old famer who challenges his nephews to a hay-loading competition. Humorous. (PB).

Purported record of a negro meeting which discusses the absurdity of women's dress and self-decoration; a consolation for misery in the thought that it could be worse; an unsuccessful collection; and a report against stocking American forests with elephants, giraffes etc. Parody in quasi-dialect. (PB).

Romantic thriller set in Chenworth, England. An orphan spends Christmas with her fiancee's family, filled with foreboding from a dream of his death she had in a railway carriage on the journey there. A mysterious woman in her carriage, a ghostly apparition in the manor house, and a woman drowning at the beach together with the tale of a mad governess comprise the tale. Well-written. (PB).

Two Hobart-Town schoolfriends separate for several years, one making his fortune on the Victorian goldfields, the other as a merchant in Richmond, Tasmania. In the 1860s they meet and discover both love the one woman; she became secretly engaged to one years before but now loves the other. The fiancee breaks his engagement to render his friend happy. Stilted. (PB).

Romance of coincidence ranging from Birmingham to London to Worthing involving a mix-up of bags, a lost sketch-book and a carriage accident. Set against a happy family background and including the narrator's rise to business success. Pleasant. (PB).

Set in London, a poor little match-boy, Dick, is helped by a rich but lonely young gentleman who he inspires to study to be a doctor at Cambridge. Dick's father dies of consumption then Dick himself sickens, leaving his baby brother to support the family by sweeping crossings - the secret of their origins to be kept til his dying day. Sentiment and pathos. (PB).

A French soldier in Algiers is arrested for selling cartridges to the Arabs - but they are blanks. (PB).

A quarrel between neighbours - an old and a young woman in a little bush township begins with a summons and ends in a murder and revelations of bigamy. Mark Sinclair, still a strooper, helps solve the feminine affair. (PB)

Tale of an inmate of a lunatic asylum, driven there when her fiancee married her sister on their own appointed wedding day. (PB).

A sculptor commissioned to erect a memorial to a rich young widow's husband has his plans reduced over the months in which her grief abates - until she remarries at last. Overworked irony. (PB).