of honeysuckle
and frankincense fills the air. Fountains leap up into the light, the
spray struck through with rainbows falling in crystalline baptism upon
flowering shrubs--then rolling down through channels of marble, and
widening out here and there into pools swirling with the finny tribes
of foreign aquariums, bordered with scarlet anemones, hypericums, and
many-colored ranunculi.

Meats of rarest bird and beast smoking up amid wreaths of aromatics.
The vases filled with apricots and almonds. The baskets piled up with
apricots and figs and oranges and pomegranates. Melons tastefully
twined with leaves of acacia. The bright waters of Eulaeus filling the
urns and dropping outside the rim in flashing beads amid the
traceries. Wine from the royal vats of Ispahan and Shiraz, in bottles
of tinged shell, and lily-shaped cups of silver, and flagons and
tankards of solid gold. The music rises higher, and the revelry breaks
out into wilder transport, and the wine has flushed the cheek and
touched the brain, and louder than all other voices are the hiccough
of the inebriates, the gabble of fools, and the song of the drunkards.

In another part of the palace, Queen Vashti is entertaining the
princesses of Persia at a banquet. Drunken Ahasuerus says to his
servants, "You go out and fetch Vashti from, that banquet with the
women, and bring her to this banquet with the men, and let me display
her beauty." The servants immediately start to obey the king's
command; but there was a rule in Oriental society that no woman might
appear in public without having her face veiled. Yet here was a
mandate that no one dare dispute, demanding that Vashti come in
unveiled before the multitude. However, there was in Vashti's soul a
principle more regal than Ahasuerus, more brilliant than the gold of
Shushan, of more wealth than the realm of Persia, which commanded her
to disobey this order of the king; and so all the righteousness and
holiness and modesty of her nature rise up into one sublime refusal.
She says, "I will not go into the banquet unveiled." Ahasuerus was
infuriate; and Vashti, robbed of her position and her estate, is
driven forth in poverty and ruin to suffer the scorn of a nation, and
yet to receive the applause of after generations, who shall rise up to
admire this martyr to kingly insolence. Well, the last vestige of that
feast is gone; the last garland has faded; the last arch has fallen;
the last tankard has been destroyed;