Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/311

 will laugh—but the next best will be the Aquarium. When you came to Naples was there a thing in the Aquarium like the ghost of a cucumber, transparent as glass, with strings of opals and rubies being drawn through its veins every two minutes regularly? Brown says that it—or its ancestor—has been there ever since he can remember. I like that green light in the Aquarium, which makes you feel as if you were a mermaid under the sea, and inclined to swim instead of walk.

When we were driving up to the hotel, Brown said it was almost as steep and winding as the road from Capri to Anacapri. That speech, and gazing from our balcony at Parker's over the blue bay to the island which looks like the Sphinx rising out of the sea, have made me distracted to take the automobile to Capri. Brown "doesn't advise it," and thinks "we may have great trouble in landing," but that makes me want the adventure all the more; so we're going to-morrow—not just for a day, like the people who don't care about Tiberius, and think the Blue Grotto is the only thing to see—but to stay for several days. Brown says one could find a new walk on the island for every day of a whole month, and each would be absolutely different from the other, though Capri is only three and a half miles long and about a mile and a half in width.

I feel as if we were in for something exciting, just as you feel, I suppose, when you are going to bring off a big coup "in the street."

Your Chip-of-the-old-Block,