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Updated: May 22, 2025
The beautiful terrace of the Villa Catalano overlooked a small bay to which it descended by winding walks. The water was deep, and in any other country the bay might have been turned to good account; but bays abounded on this coast, and the people, with many harbors, had no freights to occupy them.
Jerome was not entirely satisfied, but he thought he had done a great deal, and, to say the truth, the effort for him had not been inconsiderable; and so the result was that Lothair, accompanied by Monsignore Catesby and Father Coleman, travelled by easy stages, and chiefly on horseback, through a delicious and romantic country, which alone did Lothair a great deal of good, to the coast; crossed the straits on a serene afternoon, visited Messina and Palermo, and finally settled at their point of destination the Villa Catalano.
The terrace of the Villa Catalano, with its orange and palm trees, looked upon a sea of lapiz lazuli, and rose from a shelving shore of aloes and arbutus. The waters reflected the color of the sky, and all the foliage wag bedewed with the same violet light of morn which bathed the softness of the distant mountains, and the undulating beauty of the ever-varying coast.
Decatur stood calmly at the wheel by the side of Catalano, the pilot. "We lay packed closer than sardines in a box, and were still as so many dead men," said one of the men long afterwards to his grandchildren. About nine o'clock the moon rose, and by its clear light the ketch was steered straight across the blue waters for the bows of the Philadelphia. "Vessel ahoy!
What vessel is that?" shouted an officer of the frigate, as the Intrepid boldly came nearer. Decatur whispered to his pilot. "This is the ketch Stella, from Malta," shouted Catalano, in Italian. "We have lost our anchors, and were nearly wrecked in the gale; we want to ride near you during the night." "All right! but only until daylight," replied the officer, and ordered a line to be lowered.
"Thankee, sir," said each man when his name was called. Besides his own younger officers and his surgeon, Decatur took five young officers from the Constitution, and a Sicilian pilot named Catalano, who knew the harbor of Tripoli. That same evening, the little ketch, with its crew of some seventy-five men, sailed out of the harbor of Syracuse amid three lusty cheers.
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