last census, and the Admirals, while appreciating his
offer, had not availed themselves of it. (Maybe some one had told them
how the census officials, chiefly members of the "Giovani Fiumani," had
gone round, asking the people whether they spoke Italian and usually
filling in the papers themselves. Presumably the mayor did not propose
to allow anyone who had then been described as an Italian now to call
himself Croat.) I was just calculating what he was in 1910 when he
played a trump card and begged me to go up to the cemetery and take note
of the language used for the epitaphs. Then let me return to him on the
morrow and say what was the nationality of Rieka. There seemed to be the
question if in such a town where Yugoslavs so often use Italian as the
business language, many of them possibly might use it as the language of
death; as it happened the first Yugoslav to whom I spoke about this
point--a lawyer at whose flat I lunched the following day--produced a
little book entitled _Regolamento del Cimitero comunale di Fiume_, and
from it one could see that in the local cemetery the blessed principle
of self-determination was in fetters. Chapter iii. lays down that all
inscriptions must have the approval of the civic body. You are warned
that they will not approve of sentences or words which are indecent, and
that they prohibit all expressions and allusions that might give offence
to anyone, to moral corporations, to religions, or which are notoriously
false. No doubt, in practice, they waive the last stipulation, so that
the survivors may give praise to famous or to infamous men; but I am
told that they raised fewer difficulties for Italian wordings, and that
the stones which many people used--those which the undertakers had in
stock, with spaces left for cutting in the details--were invariably in
Italian.... I hope I have not given an unsympathetic portrait of the
mayor who has about him something lovable. Whatever Fate may have in
store for Rieka, Dr. Vio is so magnificent an emotional actor that his
future is assured. I trust it will be many years before a stone, in
Croat, Magyar or Italian, is placed above the body of this volatile
gentleman.... And then perhaps the deed of his administrative life that
will be known more universally than any other will be the omission of
an _I_ from certain postage stamps. When the old Hungarian stamps were
surcharged with the word FIUME, the sixty-third one in every sheet of
half an