out, and
hung about them in tatters. They walked neither timidly nor surlily, but
with a certain pride, neither looking at nor bowing to the people. At
the head of all came Ostap.

What were old Taras's feelings when thus he beheld his Ostap? What
filled his heart then? He gazed at him from amid the crowd, and lost
not a single movement of his. They reached the place of execution. Ostap
stopped. He was to be the first to drink the bitter cup. He glanced at
his comrades, raised his hand, and said in a loud voice: "God grant
that none of the heretics who stand here may hear, the unclean dogs, how
Christians suffer! Let none of us utter a single word." After this he
ascended the scaffold.

"Well done, son! well done!" said Bulba, softly, and bent his grey head.

The executioner tore off his old rags; they fastened his hands and feet
in stocks prepared expressly, and--We will not pain the reader with a
picture of the hellish tortures which would make his hair rise upright
on his head. They were the outcome of that coarse, wild age, when men
still led a life of warfare which hardened their souls until no sense of
humanity was left in them. In vain did some, not many, in that age make
a stand against such terrible measures. In vain did the king and many
nobles, enlightened in mind and spirit, demonstrate that such severity
of punishment could but fan the flame of vengeance in the Cossack
nation. But the power of the king, and the opinion of the wise, was as
nothing before the savage will of the magnates of the kingdom, who, by
their thoughtlessness and unconquerable lack of all far-sighted policy,
their childish self-love and miserable pride, converted the Diet into
the mockery of a government. Ostap endured the torture like a giant. Not
a cry, not a groan, was heard. Even when they began to break the bones
in his hands and feet, when, amid the death-like stillness of the crowd,
the horrible cracking was audible to the most distant spectators;
when even his tormentors turned aside their eyes, nothing like a groan
escaped his lips, nor did his face quiver. Taras stood in the crowd
with bowed head; and, raising his eyes proudly at that moment, he said,
approvingly, "Well done, boy! well done!"

But when they took him to the last deadly tortures, it seemed as though
his strength were failing. He cast his eyes around.

O God! all strangers, all unknown faces! If only some of his relatives
had been present at his death! He wo