Seven English Cities | Page 9

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 Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more genuine for that, but
there was a final cake-walk which owed its inspiration wholly to the
genius of a race destined to greater triumphs in music and art, and
perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals have evolved in yet. It
was pleasant to look upon those different shades of color, from dead
black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against an air of ungrudging,
of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say the poor things liked it
for themselves as much as I liked it for them. At a fine moment of the
affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress, standing near me, and
regarding the stage with critical severity: a young man, but shrewd and
well in hand, who, as the unmistakable manager, was, I hope, finally as
well satisfied as the other spectators.
II
I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I
inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation
to my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would
have been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence.
But would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further
it could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to
give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to
make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly
handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in
this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those 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 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