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THE STORY OP ESTHER
By Montanye Perry
rIVE hundred years before Christ, the city of Susa lay in the uplands of Susania, surrounded by a shining network of rivers which made the region a proverb for luxuriance and fertility.
A festival of unparalleled magnificence was in progress. For six months the fortress palace of Shushan had been filled with successive companies of chiefs of the Persian and Median armies, nobles and magnates of the empire. Half a year had the feasting and revelry continued by day and by night while, far in the Eas^ and West, humble subjects of the king were fighting and dying for the great empire, stretching from India to Ethiopia.
Flushed with new reports of the success of his armies, King Ahasuerus, known to the Greeks as Xerxes, sat upon a raised seat at the head of a great table in the court of the garden of the king's palace. Parti-colored hangings, held by cords of white and purple to marble pillars, turned the vast space into an open air banquet hall. The ground was paved with varied shades of marble, and stretched in long rows were couches of gold and silver, occupied by the guests.
Wine and excitement had turned the head of Ahasuerus and he called upon the seven chamberlains who waited before him to bring Vashti, the queen, unto him that the princes and the people might behold her beauty. But Vashti, fair and modest, mindful of the king's dignity as well as her own. refused to come before the halfdrunken throng. Unaccustomed to having his slightest wish disregarded, the king's anger was furious. The chief chamberlain was Vashti's enemy,
and upon his counsel a decree went forth that Vashti should nevermore come into the presence of her king, but that the fairest maidens thruout the provinces should be brought together at Shushan that a new queen might be chosen.
Near the great castle of Shushan dwelt an orphan maiden, Esther, daughter of the tribe of Benjamin, who had spent her life among the Jewish exiles in Persia where she lived under the protection of her cousin, Mordecai. Of unusual beauty and character was this young Jewess. Fair, yet modest; brave, yet gentle; the oldest blood of history warmed her veins; the light of generations of brave ancestors glowed in her starry eyes.
"I cannot," she pleaded, when Mordecai proposed that she go in with the maidens assembled at the palace; "I cannot go in before the great king. I love thee, my cousin. Father and mother and home hast thou been to me all thru my years. How, then, shall I leave thee, to go to this king who is not of my race or kindred ?"
"Listen, Esther," spoke Mordecai gravely. "Thou knowest that I love thee as my own daughter. Tenderly have I reared thee from a babe. Now I grow old, and long for thy honor and advancement — aye, for thy protection when I am gone from thee. Keeper am I of the palace gates. Every day will I send thee messages. Fear not. Think of the honor to thy race should the great Ahasuerus make thee his queen. Gro into the palace as I bid thee. Disclose not thy race nor kindred. All shall be well."
When the day came on which Esther
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