Page:Pleased to Meet You (1927).pdf/21

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II

The traveller in Illyria, whether a casual sightseer or one of the various commissioners, diplomats, and errants of fortune who found themselves there during the complications of After-War, has gazed through the high iron gates on the Pannonia Platz and admired the Farniente Palace at the end of its avenue of linden trees. Built long ago by a French architect for an Adriatic millionaire and occupied for generations by Austrian minor princes, it stands islanded in the loop of a little river and looks over the old city toward the opal horizon of the Carinthian alps. The town has the polyglot and cosmopolitan flavour appropriate to a region that has been a debatable ground among rival powers since the time of the Ostrogoths. The prime ministers and economic experts of the great powers carved out the republic of