kurens, smoked their pipes, bartered their booty for weapons, played
at leapfrog and odd-and-even, and gazed at the city with deadly
cold-bloodedness. At night they lighted their camp fires, and the
cooks boiled the porridge for each kuren in huge copper cauldrons;
whilst an alert sentinel watched all night beside the blazing fire.
But the Zaporozhtzi soon began to tire of inactivity and prolonged
sobriety, unaccompanied by any fighting. The Koschevoi even ordered
the allowance of wine to be doubled, which was sometimes done in the
army when no difficult enterprises or movements were on hand. The
young men, and Taras Bulba's sons in particular, did not like this
life. Andrii was visibly bored. "You silly fellow!" said Taras to him,
"be patient, you will be hetman one day. He is not a good warrior who
loses heart in an important enterprise; but he who is not tired even
of inactivity, who endures all, and who even if he likes a thing can
give it up." But hot youth cannot agree with age; the two have
different natures, and look at the same thing with different eyes.

But in the meantime Taras's band, led by Tovkatch, arrived; with him
were also two osauls, the secretary, and other regimental officers:
the Cossacks numbered over four thousand in all. There were among them
many volunteers, who had risen of their own free will, without any
summons, as soon as they had heard what the matter was. The osauls
brought to Taras's sons the blessing of their aged mother, and to each
a picture in a cypress-wood frame from the Mezhigorski monastery at
Kief. The two brothers hung the pictures round their necks, and
involuntarily grew pensive as they remembered their old mother. What
did this blessing prophecy? Was it a blessing for their victory over
the enemy, and then a joyous return to their home with booty and
glory, to be everlastingly commemorated in the songs of
guitar-players? or was it . . . ? But the future is unknown, and