'Nay now, Miss Peggy,' said Ephraim, much alarmed lest she should expect him to stir his rheumatic old bones in a search on the cupboard-top. 'I reckon sometimes 'tis better to think on things nor to read 'em. I've time to do a deal o' thinkin', settin' here.'
'Perhaps I might read you something else, then?' volunteered Peggy, determined to be a ministering angel, despite the evident unwillingness of her protégé.
'Yea,' said the old man, considerably relieved; 'there be a drawer full o' books i' the dresser. Take your choice, miss—take your choice.'
Peggy turned out the drawer by the simple process of emptying it on the table, and disclosed a very miscellaneous collection of literature—socialist pamphlets, agnostic newspapers, and radical tracts were mixed up with teetotal treatises, missionary leaflets, and the parish magazine. Sheets of ballads, which Ephraim had bought as a boy, lay side by side with a tattered copy or two of Zadkiel's prophetic almanac, some advertisements of patent medicines, a recipe for sheep-dip, and a Wesleyan hymn-book. Peggy gazed eagerly at an ancient chap-book, which set forth the stories of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, interspersed with rude woodcuts of the gallows and whipping-post; but she heroically put it aside, as being unsuitable for the day.
Finally, she settled upon a little worn volume bound in calf, with the title, 'A Sigh of Sorrow for the Sinners of Zion, breathed by an Earthly Vessel known among Men by the Name of Samuel Fish.'
'I'm sure Aunt Helen would think this all right to read to him,' she said to herself, as she drew a chair to the other side of the fire.
It was not very easy reading, for the print had faded till it was almost the colour of the yellow leaves, and the 's's' were all long, so that Peggy found herself continually reading 'fins' instead of 'sins'; but she did her best, conscientiously, and the old man nodded in his chair, sitting up briskly, however, when he felt her reproachful eyes upon him.
Peggy stopped, quite hot and weary, at the end of the first chapter.
'Do you like it, Ephraim?' she inquired anxiously.
'Ay, Miss Peggy, it be foine, it be, surely,' said the old man.