r lives.

Tertullo concocted a scheme worthy of the devil. No sooner were the
youths brought into his presence than he assumed the appearance of an
affectionate father, embraced them and inquired sympathetically about
their parents and their home. On their telling him they were Christians
he endeavoured, with apparent kindness, to turn them from a faith which
had brought them nothing but suffering. He promised that if they would
sacrifice to the gods of Rome they should enjoy the pleasures of a court
life. But there was none of the _Paris vaut bien une Messe_ about the
sons of the saintly Benedetta. They spurned his promises and continued
to declare themselves firm believers in the true Cross. Tertullo,
defeated and angry, thereupon showed himself in his true colours; he
dropped the affectionate parent and ordered the brothers to be tortured.
He then sent them with Captain Mercurio and a squadron of forty soldiers
to Lentini to await his return to that city.

At Mascali they were fatigued, especially Filiberto, who almost
succumbed. They prayed to the Omnipotent and, before they had risen from
their knees, the azure heavens became obscured, the wind blew, the
thunder roared, the lightning flashed and there was a great rain. The
forty soldiers fell upon their faces, frightened nearly to death, and in
the tempest onward came a venerable man, believed by all who saw him to
be S. Andrea. This personage restored the youths; whereupon the rain
ceased, the clouds dispersed, the heavens smiled again and the forty
soldiers rose from the ground declaring that the God worshipped by their
prisoners must be more powerful than they had supposed.

In those days the usual road from Taormina to Lentini passed along by the
seashore, but Captain Mercurio took the three brothers by an inland route
passing through Trecastagni, perhaps because the road by the shore was
encumbered with lava from an eruption of Etna which occurred in the year
251 or 252. When I came to this I thought of Diodorus Siculus and the
second Punic war, but I repressed the suspicion that the compiler of the
story was consciously borrowing a bit of local colour in order to get S.
Alfio to Trecastagni in a picturesque manner.

It was the end of August or the beginning of September in the year 252
when the three saints reached Trecastagni. Here they sat on a rock which
diversified the uniformity of the landscape, partook of food and reposed.
Exhilarated by