Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/110

104 but that not horses but Orthodox Christians are harnessed to them. Listen! Even that is not all. They say that the Jewesses are making themselves petticoats out of our priests' vestments. Such are the deeds that are taking place in the Ukraina, noble sirs! And you sit here revelling in Zaporozhe; and, evidently, a Tatár has so scared you that you have no eyes, no ears, no anything, and you hear nothing that is going on in the world."

"Stop, stop!" broke in the Koshevói, who, up to that moment had stood with his eyes fixed upon the earth like all Zaporozhtzi who, on important occasions never yielded to their first impulse but kept silence, and meanwhile collected privately all the menacing power of their indignation. "Stop! I, also, have a word to say. What have you been doing the while? When the Devil was thus mauling your priest,—what were you doing yourselves? Had you no swords? How did you come to permit such lawlessness?"

"Eh! How did we come to permit such lawlessness? You ought to have tried to stop it, when there were fifty thousand of the Lyakhs alone; yet, and 'tis a shame not to be concealed,