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.
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