ly afraid, but I was ashamed to let him see that, so I struggled
along somehow, and it was glorious. We ended the walk by going down a
great many steps cut in the rock to the grotto of Mitromania, where they
used 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 Ph[oe]nician 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 together as exquisitely as flowers in a brilliant garden.

I tripped gaily, too, at first, but the sun grew hot and so did I.
Still, on we went, up the face of the cliff, and with every interval for
rest came a new and wonderful view. By-and-by we got up so high that the
row boats on their way to the Blue Grotto looked like little
water-beetles, with oars for legs; and though the waves were beating
against the rocks, we could no longer see them; the water appeared as
smooth as an endless sapphire floor polished for the sirens to dance on.
It was all so entrancing that I didn't know I was almost getting a
sun-stroke; besides, who would think of sunstrokes in January, no mat