babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers
of dirt. There were also many small boys who,
I hope, were not so wicked as they were ragged.
At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops
which one would think their sharp hunger would have
pierced to the steaming and smoking dishes within.
The very morning after I had denied that man a penny
at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think
I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten,
in the cut-down tatters of a man, gloating upon a
meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the pane
in front of him. I took out the sixpence which
I ought to have given that poor man, and made it a
shilling, and put it into the boy’s wonderfully
dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie.
He looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and
then I suppose he did as he was bid. But I ought
to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything
of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield.
I felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not
go about corrupting the populace for my selfish pleasure.
Between our hotel and the main part of the town there
yawned a black valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted,
and beyond it in every direction the chimneys of the
many works thickened in the perspectives. It
was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts
of shipping in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian
fires, which send up their flames by night and their
smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent,
it was insurpassably picturesque. People must
have painted it often, but if some bravest artist-soul
would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and portray
the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one
of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world.
On our first morning the sun, when it climbed to the
upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall,
and shone down through it, and tried to pierce through
the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could
not, and it ended by shutting the hole under it, and
disappearing.
Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the
works, and smelling of the decay of market-houses,
were fine streets of shops and churches, and I dare
say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and
descending their hilly slopes. The stores I find
noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I say that
outside of the market-house, before you got to those
streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as
a raven for sale in cages; and the usual horrible
English display of flesh meats. The trams were
one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and
there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep
me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the works.
Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by
itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts;
but I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame
the reluctance of the manager to let me see it.
