In connection with this palace there is a garden, where the mighty men of foreign lands are seated at a banquet.  Under the spread of oak and linden and acacia the tables are arranged.  The breath 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; and Shushan is a ruin; but as long as the world stands there will be multitudes of men and women, familiar with the Bible, who will come into this picture-gallery of God and admire the divine portrait of Vashti the queen, Vashti the veiled, Vashti the sacrifice, Vashti the silent.