They exited London at Cripplegate and thereby passed within a block of Grub Street. Yet they were not noticed, which confirmed in Daniel’s mind a doubt that had been nagging him about newspapermen, and their choices as to what to be interested in, which struck him as bizarrely random. Though, as they worked their way to the west, he began to understand how it was that a gigantic Tsar could drive a coal-wagon full of gold and Don Cossacks through the city without attracting all that much notice. They were drawing nigh to Smithfield, with its connotations of cattle-drives, meat-markets, burnings at the stake, and seekers after violence. Many of the bonfires that had been lit on Wednesday evening were still burning now, on Saturday; for die-hard Tory Mobbs had persisted in clashing with their Whig counterparts all day Thursday, even as Ravenscar had been pressing his advantage on the loftier fronts of Whitehall and Westminster. Those disturbances had insensibly blended into the usual riotous panoply of the Hanging-March yesterday. So Smithfield, and all to its west, were now one vast smoking reeking aftermath. Peter had spoken of the Sack of Azov; Daniel wondered if it had looked anything like what they were now driving through. Shopkeepers and residents were beginning to place doors back on hinges, shovel human turds out of their forecourts, &c., but the place was still infested with feckless young men. Daniel mentally sorted these into such categories as armed irregulars, phanatiques, Vagabonds, and hanging-watchers—hasty judgments all, built on slight evidence. Any commerce-minded person passing through here must find it impossible to believe that any œconomically productive activity ever happened in England at all. And yet England prospered, and Peter knew it; how could he reconcile it with the evidence before his eyes?