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 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.
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