husband, looked sadly on from her seat on the wall-bench. She did not
dare say a word; but when she heard the decision which was so terrible
for her, she could not refrain from tears. As she looked at her
children, from whom so speedy a separation was threatened, it is
impossible to describe the full force of her speechless grief, which
seemed to quiver in her eyes and on her lips convulsively pressed
together.

Bulba was terribly headstrong. He was one of those characters which
could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century, and in that
half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern Russia,
deserted by its princes, was laid waste and burned to the quick by
pitiless troops of Mongolian robbers; when men deprived of house and
home grew brave there; when, amid conflagrations, threatening
neighbours, and eternal terrors, they settled down, and growing
accustomed to looking these things straight in the face, trained
themselves not to know that there was such a thing as fear in the
world; when the old, peacable Slav spirit was fired with warlike
flame, and the Cossack state was instituted--a free, wild outbreak of
Russian nature--and when all the river-banks, fords, and like suitable
places were peopled by Cossacks, whose number no man knew. Their bold
comrades had a right to reply to the Sultan when he asked how many
they were, "Who knows? We are scattered all over the steppes; wherever
there is a hillock, there is a Cossack."

It was, in fact, a most remarkable exhibition of Russian strength,
forced by dire necessity from the bosom of the people. In place of the
original provinces with their petty towns, in place of the warring and
bartering petty princes ruling in their cities, there arose great
colonies, kurens[3], and districts, bound together by one common