presence across the borders of unbelieving nations, that alone
indicated the germ of a political body in this gathering of men, who
otherwise lived the audacious lives of a band of highway robbers.
"There was, however," says Gogol, "none of the austerity of the
Catholic knight in them; they bound themselves to no vows or fasts;
they put no self-restraint upon themselves or mortified their flesh,
but were indomitable like the rocks of the Dnieper among which they
lived, and in their furious feasts and revels they forgot the whole
world. That same intimate brotherhood, maintained in robber
communities, bound them together. They had everything in common--wine,
food, dwelling. A perpetual fear, a perpetual danger, inspired them
with a contempt towards life. The Cossack worried more about a good
measure of wine than about his fate. One has to see this denizen of
the frontier in his half-Tatar, half-Polish costume--which so sharply
outlined the spirit of the borderland--galloping in Asiatic fashion on
his horse, now lost in thick grass, now leaping with the speed of a
tiger from ambush, or emerging suddenly from the river or swamp, all
clinging with mud, and appearing an image of terror to the
Tatar. . . ."

Little by little the community grew and with its growing it began to
assume a general character. The beginning of the sixteenth century
found whole villages settled with families, enjoying the protection of
the Cossacks, who exacted certain obligations, chiefly military, so
that these settlements bore a military character. The sword and the
plough were friends which fraternised at every settler's. On the other
hand, Gogol tells us, the gay bachelors began to make depredations
across the border to sweep down on Tatars' wives and their daughters
and to marry them. "Owing to this co-mingling, their facial features,
so different from one another's, received a common impress, tending