"Surely you must know. The Mexicans refused to accept a foreign ruler; he was sentenced to be shot, and although Carlota made the trip to France three times to beg Napoleon III to save her husband, the emperor was deaf to all her appeals."
"That was because Napoleon was not born a king, father," remarked Ferdinand. "Had he been truly royal, he would have saved Maximilian."
Herr Müller made no further comment, but shook his head slowly in an affirmative nod.
From Trieste the boat was taken to Pola, one of the oldest cities in the country, quite at the extreme tip of Istria. Although the Romans built a city here in 178 B. C., yet many of the ancient landmarks remain, among which, outside the ancient city walls, stands the splendid Amphitheatre where gladiators fought and wild beasts contended with human beings for supremacy.
As Herr Runkel was obliged to make Zara on a specified day, they were not permitted to linger in the Istrian peninsula, with its almost continuous olive-groves and vineyards, famous throughout the world; but boarding a small steamer they slowly made their way to the sea-coast town of Zara in Dalmatia, stretching like a lizard along the Adriatic.
No longer was there sign of modernism or progress; every object, every peasant spoke of the past, of long-flown glory, and of poverty. One could almost imagine himself back in those days, six hundred or more years before Christ, when the Argonauts inhabited the spot, and who, in turn, ceded to the Celts and they to the inevitable Romans. Then Charlemagne coveted Dalmatia; later the influential Venetians wrested it from the Germans; and in 1798 it was finally ceded to Austria, to whom it has ever since belonged, except for a short period when it belonged to France.
The peasants were gorgeous in their gay costumes; there were men in light-colored trousers, very tight fitting, laced with fancy cords of gold or silver thread, and most elaborately embroidered about the pockets in front; there were short jackets of bright cloth designed in intricate fashion in tinseled thread, with tassels about the edges; there were women with blue skirts, very short, over which was an apron so heavily embroidered that it seemed more like an Oriental rug than a bit of cloth, while the bodice was one mass of embroidery. Every conceivable spot was embroidered; about the neck, the shoulders, down the front and at the wrists. There was color, color, color; fringes and tassels and gold thread, as if these poor gewgaws could make up to the peasant for all the poverty he suffered and the monotony of his life. But how charming they did look in their apparel; if their lives were not the sunniest, they surely tried to embody the very sunlight into their clothing, and that helps a lot, for they were never so happy as when decked in their gayest, wearing the hand-made filigree silver ornaments about their necks, in their ears and upon their fingers, even about their waists, which no persuasion nor hunger can prevail upon them to part with.
Herr Runkel's younger brother Max was an apprentice in Zara; his term was about to expire and some arrangement must be made for the future. It was this which had brought Herr Runkel to Zara. While he was busy with his brother's affairs, the rest of the party wandered about the ancient city; they visited the market-place, alive and riotous with brilliant coloring; they inspected the wharves, and commented upon St. Mark's Lion, which reposed over the entrance-gate from the harbor, in the city wall, a relic of Venetian invasion, as if that stone lion was yet watching for the return of his people. They even crossed over to the islands, which lie like so many bits of broken mainland, to watch the fishing which is so remunerative, the sardine fishery being one of the greatest sources of revenue of the country.
His business terminated satisfactorily, Herr Runkel suggested they might return by way of the provinces of Bosnia, Croatia and Styria, because these held such wonders in sightseeing for the children.