health of the Queen being given, appeared to him, like those which hailed
her passage at the prorogation of Parliament, a most incomprehensible and
somewhat indecorous proceeding; his own health was also drunk as a _lion_,
but "not being able to reply from my ignorance of the language, a
gentleman of my acquaintance thanked them in my name; while I also stood
up and made a _salaam_, as much as to say that I highly appreciated the
honour done me." While the festivities were proceeding in the cabin, the
steamer was got underway and making the circuit of the Isle of Wight; and
on landing again at Southampton, "I was surrounded by a concourse of
people, who had collected to look at me, imagining, no doubt, that I was
some strange creature, the like of which they had never seen before."
Whether from want of time or of curiosity, he left Portsmouth, and all the
wonders of its arsenal and dockyard, unvisited, and after again going on
board the Oriental the next day, to take leave of the captain and officers,
returned in the afternoon by the railway to London.

He was next shown over the Bank of England, his remarks on which are
devoid of interest, and he visited the Paddington terminus of the Great
Western Railway, in the hope of gaining a more accurate idea of the nature
of the locomotive machinery, the astonishing powers of which he had
witnessed in his journey to Southampton. But mechanics were not the Khan's
forte; and, dismissing the subject with the remark, that "it is so
extremely complicated and difficult that a stranger cannot possibly
understand it,"[6] he returns at once to the haunts of fashion, Hyde Park
and the Opera. Hitherto the khan had been unaccountably silent on the
subject of the "Frank moons, brilliant as the sun," (as the English ladies
are called by the Persian princes, who, from the first, lose no
opportunity of commemorating their beauty in the most rapturous strains of
Oriental hyperbole;) but his enthusiasm is effectually kindled by the
blaze of charms which meets his eye in the "bazar of beauty and garden of