AustLit

Account of a soldier's wounding on the battle-field. (PB)

A lost wedding gift - an expensive earning - destroys a friendship for a time. But restitution of a kind occurs - through the agency of a canny jeweller. (PB)

The comfort the sea gives to boy, youth, man, and aged man. (PB)

Light romance. A grasping aunt forces her orphaned nieces out to work as a lady's companion and a governess - and they both find husbands. (PB)

A book-keeper at a lumber company receives a large amount of money from a client near closing time and takes it home in his coat rather than risk leaving it at the office. When the coat is stolen he resolves to lie, then to kill himself - but the coat is discovered at the last moment. (PB)

Family reunion through a portrait passed on during a US Civil War battle at Winchester. A governess recognises her own childish portrait in a souvenir of the Civil War found in her employer's army chest. He conceals that he received it from her dying father - wounded by his hand - until his own deathbed - and then discovers the doctor in attendance is the very Confederate officer he thought he had killed. (PB)

An American soldier, found asleep on sentry duty during the Revolutionary war against England is condemned to death by military execution. The narrator, an officer and friend, begs for a pardon from their General - but only discovers after the execution squad has fired that they had been ordered to shoot blanks. Tale of duty and friendship; odd idea of punishment and masculine incentive. (PB)

Blighted romance. An old maid's determination to rectify the mistakes of her youth persuades her to encourage her adopted daughter to marry the son of her early love. She inteferes in the girl's love for a city clerk, persuading her to marry the local youth. After the ceremony the girl discovers her lover's faithfulness and disappears forever rather than live hypocritically with her husband. (PB)

A legend of the German city of Worms and a Jewess saved from a Roman officer by Jehovah. (PB)

Narrative of a Detroit Alderman's days as a railway engineer in Michigan, and a near collision with an oncoming train due to a failure to put out appropriate flags. Action tale. (PB)

Instances of the warm wisdom of a British naval captain during Nelson's days - on a theft aboard ship, and the accusation of theft by a shoemaker against one of his sailors. (PB)

Margery Houghton discovers through her old aunt and a servant sent by her uncle in South America that the uncle she lives with in Melbourne has squandered her legacy. Murder follows when the brothers confront each other - and Detective Sinclair's quick eyes clear up which brother is dead. (PB)

A marriage of only short duration between an heiress and a poorer man is nearly broken through their quick tempers and her unknowing casting of her wealth before his pride. Her illness in the labour of childbirth reunites them. (PB)

Humorous description of the various duties of a newspaper staff. (PB)

A clergyman buys a new ministerial coat from the apparently needy son of a recently deceased brother clergyman. Wearing it to an ecclesiastical meeting he is held up by an accident and preaches the sermon he finds in the coat pocket to a local congregation. By this means the coat is identified as stolen and arrest nearly follows ... (PB)

Romance of philanthropy and self-sacrifice. A chance meeting with a clergyman from the London slums on holiday in a Swiss village convinces a carefree young English girl to become a nurse. She refuses an offer of marriage from another companion to return to England. Three years later she and the clergyman meet in the slums but before he can propose to her she has died of typhoid fever. Women's work question obliquely contrasted with matrimony. (PB)

In the early days of the telephone, a trade speculator is robbed of £500 by a telephone threat to murder his wife and burn his home if the money was not immediately given to an accomplice ... (PB)

Tale of filial ingratitude. An elderly farmer decides to give his farm to his daughter and her husband soon after their marriage to avoid a will. His friend warns him of King Lear's fate but he makes out the deed and slowly his friend's predictions come true as he is treated increasingly badly. He solves the problem by burning the deed and reclaiming his home. (PB)

Tragedy of an Anglican 'sister' in a slightly High Church parish in Hamstead, England. The town belle in her Kent home, she fell in love with a dashing but ribald photographer who was murdered on the eve of their wedding by the father of his first wife who he had deserted and who died insane. (PB)