Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/245

Rh threes, glorify his kazák deeds. He gazed grimly and indifferently at everything, and on his stolid face sorrow unquenchable stood forth; and he said softly, "My son, my Ostap!"

The Zaporozhtzi assembled for an expedition by sea. Two hundred boats were launched on the Dnyeper, and Asia Minor saw the kazáks, with their shaven heads and long scalp-locks, devote her thriving shores to fire and sword; she saw the turbans of her Mahometan inhabitants strewn, like her innumerable flowers, over the blood-besprinkled fields, and floating along her banks. She beheld many tarry Zaporozhian trousers, and muscular hands with black hunting-whips. The Zaporozhtzi ate up and laid waste all their vineyard. In her mosques they left heaps of dung. They used rich Persian shawls for trouser-belts, and girded their dirty doublets with them. For a long time afterwards short Zaporozhian pipes were found in those regions. Then they sailed merrily homeward again. A ten-gun Turkish vessel pursued them and scattered their fragile skiffs like birds, with a volley from its guns. A third part of them sank in the depths of the sea; but the rest assembled again, and gained the mouth of the Dnyeper with twelve kegs full of sequins. But all this had no interest for Taras. He went off upon the fields and the steppe as though to hunt; but the