as a comrade among comrades, thanked all the Cossacks for the honour,
and said, "There are among us many experienced men and much wisdom;
but since you have thought me worthy, my counsel is not to lose time
in pursuing the Tatars, for you know yourselves what the Tatar is. He
will not pause with his stolen booty to await our coming, but will
vanish in a twinkling, so that you can find no trace of him. Therefore
my advice is to go. We have had good sport here. The Lyakhs now know
what Cossacks are. We have avenged our faith to the extent of our
ability; there is not much to satisfy greed in the famished city, and
so my advice is to go."

"To go," rang heavily through the Zaporozhian kurens. But such words
did not suit Taras Bulba at all; and he brought his frowning,
iron-grey brows still lower down over his eyes, brows like bushes
growing on dark mountain heights, whose crowns are suddenly covered
with sharp northern frost.

"No, Koschevoi, your counsel is not good," said he. "You cannot say
that. You have evidently forgotten that those of our men captured by
the Lyakhs will remain prisoners. You evidently wish that we should
not heed the first holy law of comradeship; that we should leave our
brethren to be flayed alive, or carried about through the towns and
villages after their Cossack bodies have been quartered, as was done
with the hetman and the bravest Russian warriors in the Ukraine. Have
the enemy not desecrated the holy things sufficiently without that?
What are we? I ask you all what sort of a Cossack is he who would
desert his comrade in misfortune, and let him perish like a dog in a
foreign land? If it has come to such a pass that no one has any
confidence in Cossack honour, permitting men to spit upon his grey
moustache, and upbraid him with offensive words, then let no one blame