Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/43

Rh kazák is not born to run around with women. You'd like to hide them both under your petticoat, and sit upon them as if they were hen's eggs. Go, get along with you, and let us have everything there is on the table in a trice. We don't want any pastry puffs, honey-cakes, poppy-cakes, or any other messes: bring us a whole sheep, give us a goat, mead forty years old, and as much corn-brandy as possible, not with raisins and all sorts of frills, but plain, sparkling brandy, which foams and hisses like mad."

Bulba led his sons into the best room of the cottage; and two handsome women servants, in coin necklaces, who were putting the rooms in order, ran out quickly. Evidently, they were frightened by the arrival of the young men, who did not care to be familiar with any one; or else they merely wanted to maintain their feminine custom of screaming and rushing off headlong at the sight of a man, and then screening their lively shame for a long time with their sleeves. The room was furnished in accordance with the fashion of that period,—concerning which vivid hints still linger in the songs and epic lyrics, that are no longer sung in the Ukraina, by bearded old blind men, to the gentle thrumming of the bandura, in the presence of the people thronging about them,—in the taste of that warlike and troublous time,