declaration of a Rieka shopkeeper, or some such person, that the applicant worked under him? These declarations, by the way, must have refrained from going into details, for there was an almost total lack of work--except in the political department of the police. Rieka was to all intents in the possession of Italy, and she was learning what that meant. The town was like a dead place, shops were only open in the morning, and if the shopkeepers had not been compelled by the authorities to remove their shutters they would have strolled down to the quays where the grass was growing--"but, thank Heaven," cried Grossich, "thank Heaven, it is Italian grass!" (If he ever recalls that long-distant day, when, as a student, he fought for his fellow-Croats, and when, as a young doctor, he was an enthusiastic official of the Croat Club at Castua near Rieka, perhaps this gentleman thanks his God for having led him to Rieka and turned him into an Italian.) Cut off from its Yugoslav hinterland the population of Rieka, which consisted more and more of arditi and fascisti, less and less of Yugoslavs, the population had nothing to do save to speculate in the rate of exchange (but not in the local notes which no one wanted) and to prepare for the elections. Thus, with time very heavy on their hands, there was a great deal of corruption; cocaine could be obtained at nearly all the cafés. The elections drew nearer, and one wondered whether the Entente was going to look at the lists of voters and to inquire how it came that many natives of the town were not inscribed. What was likely to happen if the place was delivered altogether to the C.N.I. could be seen when the harbour of Baroš, given by the Rapallo Treaty to Yugoslavia, was demanded, simply demanded, by the Italian Nationalists; those ultra-patriots the fascisti, in Italy and in Rieka, when they saw that in the "holocaust city" everything was going just as well for them as in the brave days of d'Annunzio, persisted loudly in claiming Baroš as an integral part of Rieka. The Yugoslavs must be prevented, wherever possible, from approaching the Adriatic--this being the furious policy of the Italian capitalists who had succeeded in sweeping most of the Italian people off their feet. With Baroš, a port of limited possibilities, in the hands of the Yugoslavs, it would mean that the adjacent Rieka through its Yugoslav commerce would prosper; but anything that savoured of a Yugoslav Rieka was obnoxious to the capitalists and their wild followers, since they feared that in the first place it would raise a grievous obstacle to their penetration of the Balkans, and secondly it would involve the ruin of Triest, where German capital still plays a predominant part. So in their folly they strenuously fought for the Germans, spurred on by the terrible thought that Rieka might become predominantly Yugoslav. They refused to listen to their wiser men, who pointed out that the possession of an odd town or island was to Italy of