nes formed a canopy of green, and the music was furnished by the birds
and the murmuring sea. Here we seemed a world away from the waiting
armies and the great gray battleships, from the quarrels of Latin and
Slav. It was the first real peace that I had known after five years of
war, and I should have liked to remain there longer. But Montenegro,
Albania, Macedonia, all the unhappy, war-torn lands of the Near East lay
before me, and I turned reluctantly away. But my thoughts keep harking
back to the little town beside the turquoise bay, to the restfulness of
its old, old buildings, to the perfume of its flowers, and the
whispering voice of its turquoise sea. So some day, when the world is
really at peace and there are no more wars to write about, I think that
I shall go back to where

"Far, far from here,
The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay
Among the green Illyrian hills."

CHAPTER III

THE CEMETERY OF FOUR EMPIRES

We stood on the forward deck of the _Sirio_ as she slipped southward,
through the placid waters of the Adriatic, at twenty knots an hour. Less
than a league away the Balkan mountains, savage, mysterious, forbidding,
rose in a rocky rampart against the eastern sky.

"Did it ever occur to you," remarked the Italian officer who stood
beside me, a noted historian in his own land, "that four great empires
have died as a result of their lust for domination over the wretched
lands which lie beyond those mountains? Austria coveted Serbia--and the
empire of the Hapsburgs is in fragments now. Russia, seeing her
influence in the peninsula imperiled, hastened to the support of her
fellow Slavs--but Russia has gone down in red ruin, and the Romanoffs
are dead. Germany, seeking a gateway to the warm water, and a highway
to the East, seized on the excuse thus offered to launch her waiting
armies--and the empire reared by the Hohenzollerns is bankrupt and
broken. Turkey fought to retain her hold on such European territory as
still remained under the crescent banner. To-day a postmortem is about
to be held on the Turkish Empire and the House of Osman. Think of it!
Four great empires, four ancient dynasties, lie buried over there in the
Balkans. It is something more than a range of mountains at which we are
looking; it is the wall of a cemetery."

Rada di Antivari is a U-shaped bay, the color of a turquoise, from whose
shores the Montenegrin mountains rise in tiers, like the seats of an
arena. We put