Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/312

 P.S. I wouldn't post my Naples letter. I thought if I did, you might imagine that we and our car had been engulphed in the sea, unless you got the end of the adventure tacked on to the beginning; so this is to be a fat postscript. Yes, a gorged python of a postscript.

At first the dock people couldn't be persuaded that we seriously intended to take an automobile to the island of Capri; and when they realised that we were in earnest, they buzzed with excitement like swarming bees. Everyone directly or indirectly concerned argued at the top of his voice, and embroidered his arguments with gestures, nobody paying the slightest attention to anybody else. We didn't even ask permission to go on one of the big passenger steamers, for we knew it would be no use; but there's a little sea-chick of a thing called La Sirena, which plies back and forth every day with provisions, luggage, and passengers, to whom cheapness is an object. She was our prey; and as nobody had happened to make a law against transporting motor-cars, simply because nobody had ever thought of taking anything so abnormal since Tiberius used to send his chariots, we could not be restrained.

All the loafers in Naples collected on the quay, and I don't believe anything would have been done for us if Brown hadn't calmly begun to widen the gangway. He had suggested that I should go over in the morning with Aunt Mary on the North German Lloyd that takes the trippers (as he calls them) over for the Blue Grotto, and lunch. But I didn't see it in that light, for I wanted the adventure. Aunt Mary didn't