exclaimed the Reader, in the words and accents of his young
hero. "Never more, O God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive
hand in love and friendship. Never, never more!" The revelation of his
treachery, towards the pretty little betrothed of the young shipwright,
followed immediately afterwards, on the occasion of David's next visit,
some months later, to the old boat on the flats at Yarmouth.

The wonder still is to us, now that we are recalling to mind the salient
peculiarities of this Reading, as we do so, turning over leaf by leaf
the marked copy of it, from which the Novelist read; the wonder, we
repeat, still is to us how, in that exquisite scene, the very words that
have always moved us most in the novel were struck out in the delivery,
are rigidly scored through here with blue inkmarks in the reading copy,
by the hand of the Reader-Novelist. Those words we mean which occur,
where Ham, having on his arrival, made a movement as if Em'ly were
outside, asked Mas'r Davy to "come out a minute," only for him, on his
doing so, to find that Em'ly was not there, and that Ham was deadly
pale. "Ham! what's the matter?" was gasped out in the Reading.
But--_not_ what follows, immediately on that, in the original
narrative: "'Mas'r Davy!' Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he
wept!" Nor yet the sympathetic exclamations of David, who, in the novel,
describes himself as paralysed by the sight of such grief, not knowing
what he thought or what he dreaded; only able to look at him,--yet
crying out to him the next moment, "Ham! Poor, good fellow! For heaven's
sake tell me what's the matter?" Nothing of this: only--"My love, Mas'r
Davy--the pride and hope of my 'art, her that I'd have died for, and
would die for now--she's gone!" "Gone?" "Em'ly's run away!" Ham, _not_
then adding in the Reading, "Oh, Mas'r Davy, think _how_ she's run away,
when I pray my good and gracious God to kill her (her that is so dear
above all things) sooner than let her come to ruin and disgrace!" Yet,
for all that, in spite of these omissions--it can hardly by any chance
have been actually by reason of them--the delivery of the whole scene
was singularly powerful and affecting. Especially in the representation
of Mr. Peggotty's profound grief, under what is to him so appalling a
calamity. Especially also in the revelation of Mrs. Gummidge's pity for
him, her gratitude to him, and her womanly tender-heartedness.

In charming relief to the