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