uitok's head had
been salted and sent in a cask to Constantinople. Old Bulba hung his
head and said thoughtfully, "They were good Cossacks."

CHAPTER III

Taras Bulba and his sons had been in the Setch about a week. Ostap and
Andrii occupied themselves but little with the science of war. The Setch
was not fond of wasting time in warlike exercises. The young generation
learned these by experience alone, in the very heat of battles, which
were therefore incessant. The Cossacks thought it a nuisance to fill up
the intervals of this instruction with any kind of drill, except
perhaps shooting at a mark, and on rare occasions with horse-racing and
wild-beast hunts on the steppes and in the forests. All the rest of
the time was devoted to revelry--a sign of the wide diffusion of moral
liberty. The whole of the Setch presented an unusual scene: it was one
unbroken revel; a ball noisily begun, which had no end. Some busied
themselves with handicrafts; others kept little shops and traded;
but the majority caroused from morning till night, if the wherewithal
jingled in their pockets, and if the booty they had captured had not
already passed into the hands of the shopkeepers and spirit-sellers.
This universal revelry had something fascinating about it. It was not
an assemblage of topers, who drank to drown sorrow, but simply a wild
revelry of joy. Every one who came thither forgot everything, abandoned
everything which had hitherto interested him. He, so to speak, spat
upon his past and gave himself recklessly up to freedom and the
good-fellowship of men of the same stamp as himself--idlers having
neither relatives nor home nor family, nothing, in short, save the free
sky and the eternal revel of their souls. This gave rise to that wild
gaiety which could not have sprung from any other source. The tales and
talk current among the assembled crowd, reposing lazily on the ground,
were often so droll, and breathed such power of vivid narration, that
it required all the nonchalance of a Zaporozhetz to retain his immovable
expression, without even a twitch of the moustache--a feature which to
this day distinguishes the Southern Russian from his northern brethren.
It was drunken, noisy mirth; but there was no dark ale-house where a
man drowns thought in stupefying intoxication: it was a dense throng of
schoolboys.

The only difference as regarded the students was that, instead of
sitting under the pointer and listening to the worn-