I

The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call
these proud seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them,
and I shall not be able to follow the footmen or butlers or
housekeepers who would so obligingly show them to the reader in
my company. I had a fine consciousness of passing some of them on
my way into the town, and when there of being, however,
incongruously, in the midst of them. Worksop, more properly than
Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these aristocratic homes, or
sojourns, which no better advised traveller, or less hurried,
will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the capital of
the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I
thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well
than I could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely
kept the promise made for it by other like hotels) that I should
be tempted beyond my strength to go and see that colored opera
which we had lately sent, after its signal success with us, to an
even greater prosperity in England. _In Dahomey_ is a
musical drama not pitched in the highest key, but it is a genuine
product of our national life, and to witness its performance by
the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving it with
great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial
prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for
many Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full
that it could not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I
proudly felt that no one there could delight so intelligently as
the sole American, in the familiar Bowery figures, the blue
policemen, the varying darky types, which peopled a scene largely
laid in Africa. The local New York suggestions were often from