Explore "The Jingo" by George Randolph Chester on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The king, in solid black faintly edged with gold, raised his hand as a signal, and, from the balcony opposite the dais, there swelled a low enticing harmony. With punctilious gallantry, he led Prince Onalyon's mother upon the wide strip of tufted red carpet, which stretched from the dais to the great gold-traced doors beneath the musician's balcony, and paced with her through the first stately measure. Onalyon escorted Bezzanna and followed; then Tedoyah stepped down from the dais, and, with no hesitation whatever, selected the black-eyed little Toopy, in dainty yellow, who had just happened to be standing close by. The opening ball of Onalyon's magnificent two weeks' fete had been inaugurated, with the sanction and presence of the king himself.
The music swept into a livelier swing, after that first dignified ceremonial, and a hundred gaily bedecked couples, clad in all the soft-textured, lustrous colorings of field and forest and sky, of blossom and bird and rainbow, hailed the long-waited moment with a swelling murmur of delight, and whirled into the curving intricacies of the dance.