frequent appeals to one's pity which repeated themselves in
Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield
that you cannot have great prosperity without having adversity,
just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark.
The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived
that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of
somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no
better. The thing ought to be looked into.

At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many
works were running half-time or no time, and many people were out
of work. At one place there was a little oblong building between
branching streets, round which sat a miserable company of
Murchers, as I heard them called, on long benches under the
overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were almost
offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull
and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks,
and they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their
apathy or their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or
from their work at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale,
with no color of that south of England bloom with which they
might have favored a stranger. Slatternly girls and women
abounded, and little babies carried about by a little larger
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