most beautiful gardens on the edge of the sea, two or three miles to the
west of the city. This is the Château of Miramar, formerly the residence
of the young Austrian Archduke Maximilian, who, dazzled by the dream of
life on an imperial throne, accepted an invitation to become Emperor of
Mexico and a few years later fell before a Mexican firing-party on the
slopes of Queretaro. Though the château has now 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
château 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