Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/149

Rh in horrible convulsions, from long disuse of eating. The terrible victims of hunger startled them at almost every step. Many, apparently unable to endure their torments in their own houses, seemed to have run into the streets to see whether some nourishing power might, possibly, descend from the air. At the gate of one house sat an old woman, and it was impossible to say whether she was asleep, dead, or only unconscious; at all events, she no longer saw or heard anything, and sat motionless in one spot, her head drooping on her breast. From the roof of another house hung a strained and withered body in a rope noose. The poor fellow had not been able to endure the tortures of hunger to the end, and had preferred to hasten his death by voluntary suicide. At the sight of such terrible proofs of famine, Andríi could not refrain from asking the Tatár, "Have they really been unable to find anything with which to sustain life? If a man is driven to extremities, then there is no help for it; he must nourish him- self on that which he has hitherto despised; he may sustain himself with creatures which are forbidden by the law. Anything may be eaten under such circumstances."

"They have eaten everything," said the Tatár,—" all the animals. Not a horse or a dog, nor