y for long, the bright fence of the ladies or of the
bow-bearer seldom moving him to answer. And at last Artazostra could
endure it no more.

"What has tied your tongue, Prexaspes? Surely my brother in one of his
pleasantries has not ordered that it be cut out? Your skin is too fair to
let you be enrolled amongst his Libyan mutes."

The Hellene answered with a pitiful attempt at laughter.

"Silent, am I? Then silent because I am admiring your noble ladyship's
play of wit."

Artazostra shook her head.

"Impossible. Your eyes were glazed like the blue of Egyptian beads. You
were not listening to me. You were seeing sights and hearkening to voices
far away."

"You press me hard, lady," he confessed; "how can I answer? No man is
master of his roving thoughts,--at least, not I."

"You were seeing Athens. Are you so enamoured of your stony country that
you believe no other land can be so fair?"

"Stony it is, lady,--you have seen it,--but there is no sun like the sun
that gilds the Acropolis; no birds sing like the nightingales from the
grove by the Cephissus; no trees speak with the murmur of the olives at
Colonus, or on the hill slope at Eleusis-by-the-Sea. I can answer you in
the words of Homer, the singer of Hellas, the words he sets on the tongue
of a wanderer and outcast, even as I. 'A rugged land, yet nurse of noble
men, and for myself I can see naught sweeter than a man's own country.' "

The praise of his native land had brought the colour into the cheeks of
the Athenian, his voice rose to enthusiasm. He knew that Roxana was
watching him intently.

"Beautiful it must be, dear Hellene," she spoke, as she sat upon the
footstool below the couch of her brother, "yet you have not seen all the
world. You have not seen the mystic Nile, Memphis, Thebes, and Sais, our
wondrous cities; have not seen how the sun rises over the desert, how it
turns the sand hills to red gold, how at sunset the cliffs glow like walls
of beryl and sard and golden jasper."

"Tell then of Egypt," said Glaucon, clearly taking pleasure in the music
of her voice.

"Not to-night. I have praised it before. Rather I will praise also the
rose valleys of Persia and Bactria, whither Mardonius took me after my
dear father died."

"Are they very beautiful also?"

"Beautiful as the Egyptian's House of the Blessed, for those who have
passed the dread bar of Osiris; beautiful as Airyana-Vaeya, the home land
of the Aryans, whence Ahura-Mazda sent