oor of the Sokol or gymnastic club, observed that furniture was
being taken from the rooms below them and was being carried out into the
street. If they had asked the people what they were about they would
have heard that these things had been stored in the gymnasium during the
War and that the place was now to be devoted to its original purpose.
What they did was to believe at once the yarn of a renegade, who told
them that the people were preparing to blow up the house. The Italians
opened fire, wounded several persons and killed one of their own
carabinieri.

HOW THEY WERE RECEIVED AT ZADAR

On the mainland the Italians were received at [vS]ibenik with some
suspicion. They announced, however, that they came as representatives of
the Allies, and begged for a pilot who would take them into [vS]ibenik's
land-locked harbour, through the mine-field. The Yugoslavs consented,
and after the Italians had installed themselves they requisitioned sixty
Austrian merchant vessels which were lying in that harbour. (They left,
as a matter of fact, to the Yugoslavs out of all the ex-Austrian
mercantile fleet exactly four old boats--_Sebenico_, _Lussin_, _Mossor_
and _Dinara_--with a total displacement of 390 tons.) On the other
hand, at Zadar, they were received in a very friendly fashion. In this
town, as it had been the seat of government, with numerous officials and
their families, the Autonomist anti-Croat party had been, under Austria,
more powerful than in any other town in Dalmatia. With converts coming
in from the country, which is entirely Slav, the Autonomists in Zadar
had become well over half the population,[11] which is about 14,000,
that of the surrounding district being about 23,000. Zadar was thus a
place apart from the rest of Dalmatia, and although the Dalmatian
Autonomists were unable to claim any of the eleven deputies who went to
Vienna, they managed to be represented in the provincial Chamber--the
Landtag--by six out of the forty-one members. The Landtag was not
elected on the basis of universal suffrage; four out of these six
members were chosen by large landowners, one (Dr. Ziliotto, the mayor)
by the town of Zadar and one by the Zadar chamber of commerce. Out of
the eighty-six communes of Dalmatia, Zadar was the solitary one that was
Autonomist. Some very few Autonomists were wont to say that they aspired
to union with Italy, but it was generally thought that most of them
agreed with Dr. Ziliotto when he s