o do so also. No.
The crock must take its chance of discovery. Perhaps in a little while
he should be able to forget its existence altogether and be quite happy
again.

But it was not easy, and, as if on purpose to prevent it, Pennie's
stories had just now taken the direction of dire and dreadful subjects.
They varied a good deal at different times, and depended on the sort of
books she could get to read. After a visit to Nearminster, where Miss
Unity's library consisted of rows and rows of solemn old brown volumes,
Pennie's stories were chiefly religious and biographical, taken, with
additional touches of her own, from the lives of bygone worthies. When
she was at home, where she had read all the books in the school-room
over and over again, she had to fall back on her own invention; and then
the stories were full of fairies, goblins, dwarfs, and such like
fancies. But lately, peering over the shelves in her father's study,
where she was never allowed to touch a book without asking, she had
discovered a thick old volume called _Hone's Miscellany_. To her great
joy she was allowed to look at it, "although," her father added, "I
don't think even you, Pennie, will find much that is interesting in it."

Pennie had soon dived into the inmost recesses of the _Miscellany_,
where she found much that was interesting and much that she did not
understand. There were all sorts of queer things in it. Anecdotes of
celebrated misers, maxims and proverbs, legends and pieces of poetry,
receipts for making pickles and jams, all mixed up together, so that you
could never tell what you might find on the next page. She thought it a
most wonderful and attractive book, and picked out a store of facts and
fancies on which to build future stories.

Unfortunately for Ambrose, those which most attracted her were of a dark
and grim character. One poem, called "_The Dream of Eugene Aram_," So
thrilled and excited her that she learned it at once by heart and
repeated it to her brothers and sisters. It would have had a great
effect upon Ambrose at any time, but just now he saw a dreadful fitness
in it to his own secret. Pennie added a moral when she had finished,
which really seemed pointed directly at him.

"We learn by this," she said, "that it is of no use to hide anything,
because it is always found out; and that if we do wrong we are sure to
be punished."

Pennie was fond of morals, and they were always listened to with
respec