Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/310

 and some of the most beautiful things in the world in sight without turning our heads. It's such a homelike hotel, and instead of sending to England for orange marmalade made of Sicilian oranges, the way all the other hotels seem to do, they make it themselves out of their own oranges; and it's a poem.

We've been up Vesuvius, not in the daytime, like the humdrum tourists, but by torchlight, and we saw the moon rise. Instead of rushing to the Museum the first thing and mooning vaguely about there for hours, we saved it until after we'd been out to Pompeii on the motor-car; then it was a hundred times more interesting, and we are coming back after Capri to pay another visit to the busts of Tiberius and his terrible mother. I felt in Rome as if it were an impertinence to be modern and young. But in Pompeii—oh, I can't tell you what I felt there. I think—I really do think that I saw ghosts, and they were much more real and important than I. It was like entering the enchanted palace of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood, only a thousand times more thrilling and wonderful. I didn't feel as if anyone else had ever been there since it was dug up, except Brown and me—and, of course, Aunt Mary.

Brown knew about fascinating Italian restaurants, and he drove us up on the automobile for tea to a new hotel on a high hill, almost a mountain. It's the "smart" thing for people who know to go up to tea, which—if it's fine—you have on a great terrace that is the most beautiful thing in all Naples. And we spent a whole morning up at St. Elmo. That is going to be my best recollection, I think, and—you