or “The New York American’s despatch-boat Abbas Hilmi,” or “The Chicago Tribune’s special steamer General Gordon,” and never dreamed that the young men in sun-helmets and white linen who were writing those despatches were comfortably seated under the awnings of the same decrepit stern-wheeler, which they had chartered jointly, but on which, in order to lend importance and dignity to his despatches, each correspondent had bestowed a particular name.

But the destroyer Sirio, which we found awaiting us at Fiume, we did not have to share with any one.  Thanks to the courtesy of the Italian Ministry of Marine, she was all ours, while we were aboard her, from her knife-like prow to the screws kicking the water under her stern.

“I am under orders to place myself entirely at your disposal,” explained her youthful and very stiffly starched skipper, Commander Poggi.  “I am to go where you desire and to stop as long as you please.  Those are my instructions.”

Thus it came about that, shortly after noon on a scorching summer day, we cast off our moorings and, leaving quarrel-torn Fiume abaft, turned the nose of the Sirio sou’ by sou’-west, down the coast of Dalmatia.  The sun-kissed waters of the Bay of Quarnero looked for all the world like a vast azure carpet strewn with a million sparkling diamonds; on our starboard quarter stretched the green-clad slopes of Istria, with the white villas of Abbazia peeping coyly out from amid the groves of pine and laurel; to the eastward the bleak brown peaks of the Dinaric Alps rose, savage, mysterious, forbidding, against the cloudless summer sky.  Perhaps no stretch of coast in all the world has had so varied and romantic a history or so many masters as this Dalmatian seaboard.  Since the days of the tattooed barbarians who called themselves Illyrian, this coast has been ruled in turn by Phoenicians, Celts, Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Croats, Serbs, Bulgars, Huns, Avars, Saracens, Normans, Magyars, Genoese, Venetians, Tartars, Bosnians, Turks, French, Russians, Montenegrins, British, Austrians, Italians—­and now by Americans, for from Cape Planca southward to Ragusa, a distance of something over a hundred miles, the United States is the governing power and an American admiral holds undisputed sway.

Leaning over the rail as we fled southward I lost myself in dreams of far-off days.  In my mind I could see, sweeping past in imaginary review, those other vessels which, all down the ages, had skirted these same shores:  the purple sails of Phoenicia, Greek galleys bearing colonists from Cnidus, Roman triremes with the slaves sweating at the oars, high-powered, low-waisted Norman caravels with the arms of their marauding masters painted on their bellowing canvas, stately Venetian carracks with carved and gilded sterns, swift-sailing Uskok pirate craft, their decks crowded with swarthy men in skirts and turbans, Genoese galleons,