h ragged stones and broken bricks, ready at any moment to detach
themselves. The royal hetman, Pototzky, surrounded it on the two sides
which faced the plain. Four days did the Cossacks fight, tearing down
bricks and stones for missiles. But their stones and their strength
were at length exhausted, and Taras resolved to cut his way through the
beleaguering forces. And the Cossacks would have cut their way through,
and their swift steeds might again have served them faithfully, had not
Taras halted suddenly in the very midst of their flight, and shouted,
"Halt! my pipe has dropped with its tobacco: I won't let those heathen
Lyakhs have my pipe!" And the old hetman stooped down, and felt in the
grass for his pipe full of tobacco, his inseparable companion on all his
expeditions by sea and land and at home.

But in the meantime a band of Lyakhs suddenly rushed up, and seized him
by the shoulders. He struggled with all might; but he could not scatter
on the earth, as he had been wont to do, the heydukes who had seized
him. "Oh, old age, old age!" he exclaimed: and the stout old Cossack
wept. But his age was not to blame: nearly thirty men were clinging to
his arms and legs.

"The raven is caught!" yelled the Lyakhs. "We must think how we can show
him the most honour, the dog!" They decided, with the permission of the
hetman, to burn him alive in the sight of all. There stood hard by a
leafless tree, the summit of which had been struck by lightning. They
fastened him with iron chains and nails driven through his hands high up
on the trunk of the tree, so that he might be seen from all sides; and
began at once to place fagots at its foot. But Taras did not look at
the wood, nor did he think of the fire with which they were preparing to
roast him: he gazed anxiously in the direction whence his Cossacks were
firing. From his high point of observation he could see everything as in
the palm of his hand.

"Take possession, men," he shouted, "of the hillock behind the wood:
they cannot climb it!" But the wind did not carry his words to them.
"They are lost, lost!" he said in despair, and glanced down to where
the water of the Dniester glittered. Joy gleamed in his eyes. He saw the
sterns of four boats peeping out from behind some bushes; exerted all
the power of his lungs, and shouted in a ringing tone, "To the bank, to
the bank, men! descend the path to the left, under the cliff. There are
boats on the bank; take all, that they