much as Maximilian left it when he set out with his bride,
Carlotta, the sister of the late King Leopold of the Belgians, on his
ill-fated adventure. In the study on the ground floor hangs a
photograph, still sharp and clear after the lapse of half a century, of
the members of the delegation--swarthy men in the high cravats and long
frock-coats of the period, some of them wearing the stars and sashes of
orders--who came to Miramar to offer Maximilian the Mexican crown. The
old custodian told me that he witnessed the scene and he pointed out to
me where his young master and the other actors in this, the first act of
the tragedy, stood. How little could the youthful Emperor have dreamed,
as he set sail for those distant shores, that the day would come when
the Dual Monarchy would go down in ruins, when the ancient dynasty of
the Hapsburgs would come to an inglorious end, and when the garden paths
where he and his beautiful young bride used to saunter in the moonlight
would be paced by Italian carabineers.

If you will get out the atlas and turn to the map of Italy you will
notice at the head of the Adriatic a peninsula shaped like the head of
an Indian arrow, its tip aimed toward the unprotected flank of Italy's
eastern coast. This arrow-shaped peninsula is Istria. In the western
notch of the arrowhead, toward Italy, is Trieste--terminus of the
railway to Vienna. In the opposite notch is Fiume--terminus of the
railway which runs across Croatia and Hungary to Budapest. And at the
very tip of the arrow, as though it had been ground to a deadly
sharpness, is Pola, formerly Austria's greatest naval base. Dotting the
western coast of Istria, between Trieste and Pola, are four small
towns--Parenzo, Pirano, Capodistria and Rovigno--all purely and
distinctively Italian, and, on the other side of the peninsula, the
famous resort of Abbazia, popular with wealthy Hungarians and with the
yachtsmen of all nations before the war.

Parenzo, Pirano, Capodistria and Rovigno were all outposts of the
Venetian Republic, forming an outer line of defense against the Slav
barbarians of the interior. Everything about them speaks of Venice: the
snarling Lion of St. Mark which is carved above their gates and
surmounts the marble columns in their piazzas; their old, old
churches--the one at Parenzo was built in the sixth century, being
copied after the famous basilica at Ravenna, across the Adriatic--the
interiors of many of them adorned, like tha