The Happy Venture | Page 2

sliced (when you were
allowed), yet you were told that they were as red as red could be! And
nothing could have been hotter than the blue tea-pot, when he picked it
up by its spout; but that, to be sure, was caused by the tea. Yet the hot
wasn't any color; oh, dear!
Ken had not practised the art of seeing stories for nothing. He plunged
in with little hesitation, and with a grand flourish.
"My tale is of kings, it is," he said; "ancient kings--Babylonian kings, if
you must know. It was thousands and thousands of years ago they lived,
and you'd never be able to imagine the wonderful cities they built. They
had hanging gardens that were----" Felicia interrupted.
"It's easy to tell where you got this story. I happen to know where your
marker is in the Ancient History."
"Never you mind where I got it," Ken said. "I'm trying to describe a
hanging garden, which is more than you could do. As I was about to
say, the hanging gardens were built one above the other; they didn't
really hang at all. They sat on big stone arches, and the topmost one
was so high that it stuck up over the city walls, which were quite high
enough to begin with. The tallest kinds of trees grew in the gardens; not
just flowers, but big palm-trees and oleanders and citron-trees, and
pomegranates hung off the branches all ready to be picked,--dark
greeny, purpley pomegranates all bursting open so that their bright red
seeds showed like live coals (do you think I'm getting this out of the
history book, Phil?), and they were _this_-shaped--" he drew a
pomegranate on the back of Kirk's hand--"with a sprout of leaves at the
top. And there were citrons--like those you chop up in fruit-cake--and
grapes and roses. The queen could sit in the bottomest garden, or walk
up to the toppest one by a lot of stone steps. She had a slave-person
who went around behind her with a pea-cock-feathery fan, all green
and gold and beautiful; and he waved the fan over her to keep her cool.
Meanwhile, the king would be coming in at one of the gates of the city.
They were huge, enormous brass gates, and they shone like the sun,
bright, and the sun winked on the king's golden chariot, too, and on the
soldiers' spears.

"He was just coming home from a lion-hunt, and was very much
pleased because he'd killed a lot of lions. He was really a rather horrid
man,--quite ferocious, and all,--but he wore most wonderful purple and
red embroidered clothes, the sort you like to hear about. He had a tiara
on, and golden crescents and rosettes blazed all over him, and he wore
a mystic, sacred ornament on his chest, round and covered all over with
queer emblems. He rode past the temple, where the walls were painted
in different colors, one for each of the planets and such, because the
Babylonish people worshipped those--orange for Jupiter, and blue for
Mercury, and silver for the moon. And the king got out of his chariot
and climbed up to where the queen was waiting for him in the toppest
gar--"
"Don't you tell me they were so domestic and all," Felicia objected.
"They probably--"
"Who's seeing this story?" Ken retorted. "You let me be. I say, the
queen was waiting for him, and she gave him a lotus and a ripe
pomegranate, and the slaves ran and got wine, and the people with
harps played them, and she said--Here's Mother!"
Kirk looked quite taken aback for a moment at this apparently
irrelevant remark of the Babylonian queen, till a faint rustle at the
doorway told him that it was his own mother who had come in.
She stood at the door, a slight, tired little person, dressed in one of the
black gowns she had worn ever since the children's father had died.
"Don't stop, Ken," she smiled. "What did she say?"
But either invention flagged, or self-consciousness intervened, for
Kenelm said:
"Blessed if I know what she did say! But at any rate, you'll agree that it
was quite a garden, Kirky. I'll also bet a hat that you haven't done your
lesson for to-morrow. It's not your Easter vacation, if it is ours. Miss
Bolton will hop you."

"Think of doing silly reading-book things, after hearing all that," Kirk
sighed.
"Suppose you had to do cuneiform writing on a dab of clay, like the
Babylonish king," Ken said; "all spikey and cut in, instead of sticking
out; much worse than Braille. Go to it, and let Mother sit here,
laziness."
Kirk sighed again, a tremendous, pathetic sigh, designed to rouse
sympathy in the breasts of his hearers. It roused