The multitude of moveable workshops of tinkers and barbers, coblers and blacksmiths; the tents and booths where tea and fruit, rice and other eatables were exposed for sale, with the wares and merchandize arrayed before the doors, had contracted this spacious street to a narrow road in the middle, just wide enough for two of our little vehicles to pass each other. The cavalcade of officers and soldiers that preceded the embassy, the processions of men in office attended by their numerous retinues, bearing umbrellas and flags, painted lanterns, and a variety of strange insignia of their rank and station, different trains that were accompanying, with lamentable cries, corpses to their graves, and, with squalling music, brides to their husbands, the troops of dromedaries laden with coals from Tartary, the wheelbarrows and hand-carts stuffed with vegetables, occupied nearly the whole of this middle space in one continued line, leaving very little room for the cavalcade of the embassy to pass. All was in motion. The sides of the street were filled with an immense concourse of people, buying and selling and bartering their different commodities. The buzz and confused noises of this mixed multitude, proceeding from the loud bawling of those who were crying their wares, the wrangling of others, with every now and then a strange twanging noise like the jarring of a cracked Jew's harp, the barber's signal made by his tweezers, the mirth and the laughter that prevailed in every groupe, could scarcely be exceeded by the brokers in the Bank rotunda, or by the Jews and old women in _Rosemary-Lane_. Pedlars with their packs, and jugglers, and conjurers, and fortune-tellers, mountebanks and quack-doctors, comedians and musicians, left no space unoccupied. The Tartar soldiers, with their whips, kept with difficulty a clear passage for the embassy to move slowly forwards; so slow, indeed, that although we entered the eastern gate at half-past nine, it was near twelve before we arrived at the western.