Outside the cafe, on the Square (where flocks of pigeons whirl around as at St. Mark’s in Venice), every little table is occupied; but here the women are gowned in the latest Vienna fashions, and Austrian uniforms predominate.  And the sun shines as warmly as in June (on this 25th day of March), and the cathedral bells chime a merry accompaniment to a military band; a sky of the brightest blue gladdens the eye, fragrant flowers the senses, and the traveler sips his bock or mazagran, and thanks his stars he is not spending the winter in cold, foggy England.  Refreshments are served by a white-aproned garcon, and street boys are selling the “Daily Mail” and “Gil Blas,” just as they are on the far-away boulevards of Paris.

CATTARO[13]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

The end of a purely Dalmatian pilgrimage will be Cattaro.  He who goes further along the coast will pass into lands that have a history, past and present, which is wholly distinct from that of the coast which he has hitherto traced from Zara—­we might say from Capo d’Istria—­onward.  We have not reached the end of the old Venetian dominion—­for that we must carry our voyage to Crete and Cyprus.  But we have reached the end of the nearly continuous Venetian dominion—­the end of the coast which, save at two small points, was either Venetian or Regusan—­the end of that territory of the two maritime commonwealths which they kept down to their fall in modern times, and in which they have been succeeded by the modern Dalmatian kingdom....

The city stands at the end of an inlet of the sea fifteen or twenty miles long, and it has mountains around it so high that it is only in fair summer weather that the sun can be seen; in winter Cattaro never enjoys his presence.  There certainly is no place where it is harder to believe that the smooth waters of the narrow, lake-like inlet, with mountains on each side which it seems as if one could put out one’s hand and touch, are really part of the same sea which dashes against the rocks of Ragusa.  They end in a meadow-like coast which makes one think of Bourget or Trasimenus rather than of Hadria.  The Dalmatian voyage is well ended by the sail along the Bocche, the loveliest piece of inland sea which can be conceived, and whose shores are as rich in curious bits of political history as they are in scenes of surpassing natural beauty.

The general history of the district consists in the usual tossing to and fro between the various powers which have at different times been strong in the neighborhood.  Cattaro was in the reign of Basil the Macedonian besieged and taken by Saracens, who presently went on unsuccessfully to besiege Ragusa.  And, as under Byzantine rule it was taken by Saracens, so under Venetian rule it was more than once besieged by Turks.  In the intermediate stages we get the usual alternations of independence and of subjection to all the neighboring