passed into the possession of the Italian Government it is still in charge of the aged custodian who, as a youth, was body-servant to Maximilian.  Barring the fact that the paintings and certain pieces of furniture had been removed to Vienna to save from injury by aerial bombardment, the interior of the chateau is 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 that of St. Mark’s in Venice, with superb mosaics of gold and semi-precious stones; the carved lions’ heads, bocca del leone, for receiving secret missives; the delicate tracery above the doors and