When I see a woman of comely features, and of adroitness of intellect, and endowed with all that the schools can do for one, and of high social position, yet moving in society with superciliousness and _hauteur_, as though she would have people know their place, and with an undefined combination of giggle and strut and rhodomontade, endowed with allopathic quantities of talk, but only homeopathic infinitesimals of sense, the terror of dry-goods clerks and railroad conductors, discoverers of significant meanings in plain conversation, prodigies of badinage and innuendo--I say: "Vashti has lost her veil." III. Again, I want you this morning to consider Vashti the sacrifice. Who is this that I see coming out of that palace gate of Shushan? It seems to me that I have seen her before. She comes homeless, houseless, friendless, trudging along with a broken heart. Who is she? It is Vashti the sacrifice. Oh! what a change it was from regal position to a wayfarer's crust! A little while ago, approved and sought for; now, none so poor as to acknowledge her acquaintanceship. Vashti the sacrifice! Ah! you and I have seen it many a time. Here is a home empalaced with beauty. All that refinement and books and wealth can do for that home has been done; but Ahasuerus, the husband and the father, is taking hold on paths of sin. He is gradually going down. After awhile he will flounder and struggle like a wild beast in the hunter's net--further away from God, further away from the right. Soon the bright apparel of the children will turn to rags; soon the household song will become the sobbing of a broken heart. The old story over again. Brutal Centaurs breaking up the marriage feast of Lapithæ. The house full of outrage and cruelty and abomination, while trudging forth from the palace gate are Vashti and her children. There are homes represented in this house this morning that are in danger of such breaking-up. Oh, Ahasuerus! that you should stand in a home, by a dissipated life destroying the peace and comfort of that home. God forbid that your children should ever have to wring their hands, and have people point their finger at them as they pass down the street, and say, "There goes a drunkard's child." God forbid that the little feet should ever have to trudge the path of poverty and wretchedness! God forbid that any evil spirit born of the wine-cup or the brandy-glass should come forth and uproot that garden, and with a lasting, blistering, all-consuming curse, shut forever the palace gate against Vashti and the children.