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.


III

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