“The Demon,” they began calling her instead of Domenica, and felt that like Michael Scott and his demon servant, they would be obliged to set her to weaving ropes of sand, the keeping her supplied with normal tasks seemed so impossible. It became almost 72a pleasure to find a gown too loose or too tight, that she might alter it, or to spot or tear one, and as for ripped skirt bindings or torn petticoat ruffles, they looked at each other in delight and cried exultantly, “a job for the Demon!” Tea-basket kettles to scour they gave her, silver to clean, errands to do, fine things to wash, their entire wardrobes to press out; yet still the little figure sat in her corner reproachfully idle, looking at them questioningly, and sighing like a furnace until some new task was procured her. Desperately they took to giving her afternoons off, and invariably dismissed her before the bargained time in the evening. But still to find grist for the mill of her industry kept them racking their brains unsuccessfully through all their Taormina days. Home comforts and maid once secured they could turn to Taormina itself with open minds, and plunge into a flood of beauty and queernesses and history. Of the guide-books some say that Taormina was the acropolis of Naxos, an off-shoot of that first Greek town, others that it, like Mola, was a Sikilian stronghold long before the days of the Greeks. Jane’s private theory was that neither Greeks nor Sikilians had been its founders, that eagles alone would ever first have built on that dizzy windy perch! On the very ridge of a mountain spine with higher peaks overhanging, Taormina twists its one real street, houses climbing up or slipping down hill as best they may, all clinging tight, and holding hands fast along the street to balance themselves there at all. Dark stairway cracks between lead up or down, and overhead flying arches or linked stories keep the clasp unbroken. 73Here and there a little street manages to twist off and find a few curves for itself on another level, or the street widens into a wee square, or a terrace beside an old church is edged with a stone-benched balustrade where ancient loafers may sun themselves and look down at the tiny busy specks of fishing boats in the sea far below.