There is a good deal more crowd and animation in Fleet Street than in the Strand. That is because we are nearer the City, of course; the traffic is greater; the noise is much greater. As for this ring before us, let us avoid it. A coachman fighting a ticket-porter is a daily spectacle in this thoroughfare; those who crowd round often get bloody noses for their pains, and still more often come away without their purses. Look! The pickpockets are at their work almost openly. They have caught one. Well, my friend, our long silk purses--yours will be square leather things--are very easily stolen. I do not think it will repay you for the loss of yours to see a poor devil of a pickpocket pumped upon. You are looking again at the plain windows with the small square panes. The shops make no display as yet, you see. First, it would not be safe to put valuable articles in windows protected by nothing but a little thin pane of glass--which reminds me that in the matter of street safety you will be a good deal ahead of us; next, an honest English tradesman loves to keep his best out of sight. The streets are horribly noisy. That is quite true. You have heard of the roar of the mighty city. Your London, Eighty-seven, will not know how to roar. But you can now understand what its roaring used to be. An intolerable stir and uproar, is it not? But then your ears are not, like ours, used to it. First, the road is not macadamised, or asphalted, or paved with wood. Next, the traffic of wagons, carts, and wheelbarrows, and hand-carts, is vastly greater than you had ever previously imagined; then there is a great deal more of porter work done in the street, and the men are perpetually jostling, quarrelling, and fighting; the coaches, those of the short stages with two horses, and the long stages with four, are always blowing their horns and cracking their whips. Look at yonder great wagon. It has come all the way from Scotland. It is piled thirty feet high with packages of all kinds: baskets hang behind, filled with all kinds of things. In front there sit a couple of Scotch lasses who have braved a three weeks’ journey from Edinburgh in order to save the expense of the coach. Brave girls! But such a wagon with such a load does not go along the street in silence. It is not in silence either that the women who carry baskets full of fish on their heads go along the street, nor is the man silent who goes with a pack-donkey loaded on either side with small coal; and the wooden sledge on which is the cask of beer, dragged along by a single horse, makes by itself as much noise as all your carriages together, Eighty-seven.