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.