had been heard to mutter threats against his life. He had apologized to the inhabitants, and had dismissed one of his men who had hauled down a Yugoslav flag and blown his nose on it. For these men an extenuating circumstance was that they had been very drunk on the night before our arrival, as they had heard--it was in the first half of June 1919--that the islands had been definitely given to Italy, and this they had been celebrating. We knew that after an American and an Englishman had visited Jelša, in the time of the other commandant, some of the people were interned; the young captain assured us that he would do no such thing. And one could see that he would never imitate the brutality of his predecessor, who had caused a frail old man of sixty-six, Professor Zarić, to be pulled out of his bed in the middle of a winter's night and taken across the hills on a donkey to Starigrad, afterwards on a destroyer to Split, from where--but for the intervention of the American Admiral--he would have been deported to Italy; and all on account of his having written, in English and French, a scientific ethnographical treatise on the islands. PROCEEDINGS AT STARIGRAD At Starigrad on our arrival the harbour and its precincts looked like the scene of an opera, with an opening chorus of carabinieri. They were posted at various tactical points and no one else was visible. One of them advanced, however, and conducted us at our request to the office of the Commandant, a major who must have played a very modest part in the War, as I believe he only had three rows of ribbons.[39] He gave us some vermouth and informed us that the population was very quiet, very happy. When I said that I would like to see the mayor he sent an orderly, and in less than one minute his worship stood before us. He immediately confirmed what the major had said with regard to the population. In fact the picture which he drew brought back to memory the comment of the Queen of Roumania who, when an American lady at a reception in Belgrade told her that she lived at a place called Knoxville or Coxville in the States, replied "How nice!" The good Italians, quoth the mayor, were distributing supplies among the natives, and with the exception of the Croat _intelligentsia_ they all wished for union with Italy. I asked him if he did not think that, looking at it from the economic point of view, there would be some difficulties when the island's exports--wine and oil and fish--would have to compete with the products of Italy. But he said that one must think of the other benefits--no longer would the island have to bear the hated Austrian. It was all the fault of Austria, he continued, that after 1885 the Starigrad municipality had been Croat; since then the Italians had lost their school and their orchestra. But now it would all be changed. He was clearly a product of the new dispensation; and he told me that as the ex-mayor was an Austrian of course he had to be discharged.