port of the size and importance which the foreign commerce of Hungary
would have seemed to require, this being largely due to its unfortunate
geographical condition, for the dreary and inhospitable Karst completely
shuts the city off from the interior, the numerous tunnels and steep
gradients making rail transport by this route difficult and consequently
expensive.

The public life of the city centers in the Piazza Adamich, a broad
square on which front numerous hotels, restaurants, and coffee-houses,
before which lounge, from midmorning until midnight, a considerable
proportion of the Italian population, sipping _café nero_, or tall
drinks concocted from sweet, bright-colored syrups, scanning the papers
and discussing, with much noise and gesticulation, the political
situation and the doings of the peace commissioners in Paris. Save only
Barcelona, Fiume has the most excitable and irritable population of any
city that I know. When we were there street disturbances were as
frequent as dog-fights used to be in Constantinople before the Turks
recognized that the best gloves are made from dogskins. As I have said,
a few days before our arrival a mob had attacked and killed in most
barbarous fashion a number of Annamite soldiers who were guarding a
French warehouse on the quay. Several prominent Fumani with whom I
talked attempted to justify the massacre on the ground that a French
sailor had torn a ribbon bearing the motto "_Italia o Morte_!" from the
breast of a woman of the town. They did not seem to regret the affair or
to realize that it is just such occurrences which lead the Peace
Conference to question the wisdom of subjecting the city's Slav minority
to that sort of rule. As a result of the tense atmosphere which
prevailed in the city, the nerves of the population were so on edge that
when my car back-fired with a series of violent explosions, the loungers
in front of a near-by café jumped as though a bomb had been thrown among