Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/319

 to worship the sun-god and sacrifice living victims—human beings sometimes. You can see the altar still, and the trough where the blood used to run—ugh! and the secret chambers where they kept the victims.

We stayed a day and two nights in the town of Capri, and should have stopped on till we were ready to leave the island, for it is a charming hotel, with a big garden and a ravishing view; but I got it into my head that I wanted to walk up all the Phœnician steps to Anacapri—there are about eight hundred of them—instead of going up by a mere road, no matter how beautiful. Of course, Aunt Mary was consumed with no such mad ambition, and as she had heard that to go up the steps was like walking up a wall, she was afraid to have me try the ascent alone; so I asked Brown to take me. We started after breakfast; and to go up all the steps we first had to descend to the very shore, near a palace of Tiberius', which is buried under the sea with all its treasures. Doesn't that sound like a fairy story? Then we began going up and up, and we kept meeting peasant girls tripping gaily down in their rope shoes, singing together like happy birds, not even touching with their hands the loaded baskets on their heads. They were so beautiful that they were more like stage peasants than real ones. Their eyes were great stars, and their clear, olive faces were like cameos with a light shining through from behind. They were dressed in the simplest cotton dresses, but their pinks and blues and purples, put on without any regard to artistic contrast, blended