s were ushered into his presence.
They had been entrusted by the Senate with the task of following the
armies and congratulating Napoleon or the Archduke, according to which
of them had won the last battle. These envoys may have taken a
despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but
when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens,
stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in
their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them
so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadar--_la
tanto disputata_--the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of
the Dalmatian coast the nobles scarcely had to say a word before the
peasants had snatched arms to fight the French and their _egalite_.
The Venetians had, after all, been there a long time, even if they had
not risen to the heights of Dubrovnik, which, as we learn from a
traveller in 1805, kept no secret police and no gendarmes, and where a
capital sentence pronounced at the time was the first in twenty-five
years. (The city went into mourning on account of this, and an
executioner had to be imported from Turkey.) Such a moral height had
not been reached by the Venetians; but they had been in Dalmatia, as
people loved to repeat, for a long time, and they had been easy-going
in the collection of taxes, they had supported the bishops and the
holy Church, they had made the peasants feel that each one of them was
helping to support Venice, the grand and ancient, and so the faithful
people mourned when she was falling.

THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS

Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the
Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the
civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post
given to General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An
eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir.
The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language
whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the
Emperor and King, Francis II., and his descendants and legal
successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!"] was the unanimous
reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a
vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["My dear Dalmatians"], said
he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were
disembarked, the people c