Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/208

202 hawks the youths repeated: "To the Syech!" And the distant plain heard how the kazáks commemorated their Syech.

"Now, a last draught, comrades, to the glory of all Christians now living in the world!"

And every kazák drank a last draught to the glory of all Christians in the world. And among the ranks, in all the kuréns, they long repeated: "For all the Christians in the world!"

The ladles were empty, but the kazáks still stood with their hands uplifted. Although the eyes of all gleamed cheerily with the liquor, all were thinking deeply. Not of greed or of the spoils of war were they thinking now, nor of which of them would be lucky enough to acquire ducats, fine weapons, embroidered kaftans and Cherkessian horses; but they were meditating like eagles perched upon the rocky crests of lofty, precipitous mountains, from which, far away, the boundless sea is visible, dotted, as with tiny birds, with galleys, ships, and every sort of vessel, confined at the sides by scarcely visible, thin lines of shore with their sea-coast cities like gnats, and their bending forests like short grass. Like eagles they gazed about them over all the plain, and at their Fate