James Fenimore Cooper

The Wing-and-Wing James Fenimore Cooper

It was now nearly dark, and the crowd, having satisfied its idle curiosity, began slowly to disperse. The Signor Viti remained till the last, conceiving it to be his duty to be on the alert in such troubledtimes; but, with all his bustling activity, it escaped his vigilance and means of observation to detectthe circumstance that the stranger, while he steered into the bay with so much confidence, hadcontrived to bring up at a point where not a single gun from the batteries could be brought to bearon him; while his own shot, had he been disposed to hostilities, would have completely raked thelittle haven. But Vito Viti, though so enthusiastic an admirer of the art, was no gunner himself, andlittle liked to dwell on the effect of shot, except as it applied to others, and not at all to himself. Of all the suspicious, apprehensive, and curious, who had been collected in and about the port, sinceit was known the lugger intended to come into the bay, Ghita and 'Maso alone remained on watch, after the vessel was anchored. A loud hail had been given by those intrusted with the execution ofthe quarantine laws, the great physical bugbear and moral mystification of the Mediterranean; andthe questions put had been answered in a way to satisfy all scruples for the moment. The "Fromwhence came ye?" asked, however, in an Italian idiom, had been answered by "Inghilterra, touchingat Lisbon and Gibraltar," all regions beyond distrust, as to the plague, and all happening, at thatmoment, to give clean bills of health. But the name of the craft herself had been given in a way topuzzle all the proficients in Saxon English that Porto Ferrajo could produce. It had been distinctlyenough pronounced by some one on board, and, at the request of the quarantine department, hadbeen three times slowly repeated, very much after the following form; viz