The Fair of Nijni-Novgorod

Edna Dean Proctor

  Was ever such a crowd?

Here Turks and Jews and Gypsies,

  There Persians haughty-browed;

With silken-robed Celestials,

  And Frenchmen from the Seine,

And Khivans and Bokhariotes,—

  Heirs of the Oxus plain.

 

Here stalk Siberian hunters;

  There tents a Kirghiz clan

By mournful-eyed Armenians

  From wave-girt Astrakhan;

And Russ and Pole and Tartar,

  And mounted Cossack proud,—

Now, by the Tower of Babel,

  Was ever such a crowd?