I was glad when the procession stopped before the gorgeous entrance to the palace.  Another minute of such splendor would have blinded me.  A fanfare of trumpets sounded, and I descended, so dizzy with what I had seen that, as my feet touched the ground, I staggered like a drunken man, and then I heard my name sounded and passed from one flunky to another up the magnificent staircase into the blue haze of the hallway, and gradually sounding fainter and fainter until it was lost in the distance of the mysterious corridor.  I still staggered as I mounted the steps, and the Major Domo approached me.

“I trust you are not ill,” he whispered in my ear.

“No—­not ill,” I replied.  “Only somewhat flabbergasted by all this magnificence, and my eyes hurt like the very deuce.”

“It is perhaps too much for mortal eyes,” he said; and then, turning to a gilded Ethiopian who stood close at hand, he observed, quietly, “Rhadamus, run over to the Argus and ask him if he can spare this gentleman a pair of blue goggles for an hour or two.”

“Better get me a dozen pairs,” I put in.  “I don’t think one pair will be enough.  It may strain my nose to hold them, but I’d rather sacrifice my nose than my eyes any day.”

But the boy was off, and ere I reached the presence of Jupiter I was very kindly provided with the very essential article, and I must confess that I found great relief in them.  They were so densely blue that an ordinary bit of splendor could not have been discerned through their opaque depths, any more than Thisbe could have been seen by her doting lover, Pyramus, through the wall that separated them, but nothing known to man could have shut out the supreme gloriousness of the interior of Jupiter’s palace.  Even with the goggles of the Argus regulated to protect one thousand eyes upon my nose, it made my dazzled optics blink.

I do not know what the proportions of the palace were.  I regret to say that I forgot to ask, but I am quite confident that I walked at least eight miles along that corridor, and never was a mansion designed that was better equipped in the matter of luxuries.  I suspect I shall be charged with exaggerating, but it is none the less true that within that spacious building were appliances of every sort known to man.  One door opened upon an in-door golf-links, upon which the royal family played whenever they lacked the energy or the disposition to seek out that on Mars.  There were high bunkers, the copse of which was covered with richest silk plush, stuffed, I was told, with spun silk, while, in place of sand, tons of powdered sugar and grated nutmegs filled the bunkers themselves.  The eighteen holes were laid out so that no two of them crossed, and, inasmuch as the turf was constructed of rubber instead of grass and soil, neither a bad lie nor a dead ball was possible through the vast extent of the fair green.  The water hazards, four in number, were nothing more nor less than huge tanks of Burgundy, champagne, iced tea, and Scotch—­which I subsequently learned often resulted in a bad caddie service—­and an open brook along whose dashing descent a constant stream of shandygaff went merrily bubbling onward to an in-door sea upon which Jupiter exercised his yacht when sailing was the thing to suit his immediate whim.