Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/321

 I had fainted and they had sent for a doctor. Presently he appeared, and afterwards I found out that he was quite a celebrity—the "Doctor Antonio" of Capri. He said it was the sun; I hadn't eaten enough breakfast, and I'd had a "heat-stroke"—not half so bad as a sun-stroke; still, I ought to rest.

I was quite willing to obey the prescription, for I was falling in love with the house, and longed to stay in it for days. The room I was in had four windows, each one looking out on a view that stay-at-home people would give hundreds of dollars to see; and it opened on to a lovely private terrace. Brown took a message "downstairs" to Capri, asking Aunt Mary to pack up and come to the Bella Vista, which she did, and we've been here for two days. I was quite well in a few hours, but I wouldn't have gone back to more conventional comforts for anything. Anacapri and our little house seem as if they were in the world on top of the clouds which Jack discovered when he climbed his beanstalk up into the sky. Why, the first morning when I waked here, and opened my glass door on to the terrace to look at the sea, and the umbrella pines, and the cypresses (which I seem to hear, as well as see, like sharp notes in music), four or five large white clouds got up from the terrace where they'd been sitting and sneaked past me through the door into the room, just like the cows which, I suppose, the gods kept on Olympus to milk for their ambrosia. And the sunsets, with Vesuvius set like a great conical amethyst in a blaze of ruby and topaz glory! It is something to come to Anacapri for. But at the Bella Vista