It is the House of the Forest of Lebanon. King Solomon has just taken to it his bride, the princess of Egypt. You see the pillars of the portico and a great tower, adorned with a thousand shields of gold, hung on the outside of the tower. Five hundred of the shields of gold were manufactured at Solomon’s order, and five hundred were captured by David, his father, in battle. See how they blaze in the noonday sun!
Solomon goes up to the ivory stairs of his throne between twelve lions in statuary, and sits down on the back of the golden bull, the head of the bronze beast turned toward the people.
The family and attendants of the king are so many that the caterers of the place have to provide every day one hundred sheep and thirteen oxen, besides the birds and the venison. I hear the stamping and pawing of four thousand horses in the royal stables.
They were important officials who had charge of the work of gathering the straw and the barley for all these horses.
King Solomon was an early riser, tradition says, and used to take a ride out at daybreak; and when in his white apparel, behind the swiftest horses of all the kingdom and followed by mounted archers in purple, as the cavalcade dashed through the streets of Jerusalem I suppose it was something worth getting up at five o’clock in the morning to look at.
Solomon was not like some of the kings of the present day—crowned imbecility. All the splendor of his palace and retinue was eclipsed by his intellectual powers. Why, he seemed to know every thing. He was the first great naturalist the world ever saw. Peacocks from India strutted the basaltic walks, and apes chattered in the trees and deer stalked the parks, and there were aquariums with foreign fish and aviaries with foreign birds; and tradition says these birds were so well tamed that Solomon might walk clear across the city under the shadow of their wings as they hovered and flitted about him.
King Solomon had a great reputation for the conundrums and riddles that he made and guessed. He and King Hiram, his neighbor, used to sit by the hour and ask riddles, each one paying in money if he could not answer or guess the riddle.
The Solomonic navy visited all the world, and the sailors, of course, talked about the wealth of their king, and about the riddles and enigmas that he made and solved.
Solomon had at his command gold to the value of £680,000,000, and he had silver to the value of £1,029,000,377. The Queen of Sheba made him a nice little present of £720,000, and King Hiram made him a present of the same amount.
If Solomon had lost the value of a whole realm out of his pocket, it would hardly have been worth his while to stoop down and pick it up.