Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/44

38 when skirmishes and battles began to occur in the Ukraina over the Union. Everything was neat, plastered with coloured clay. On the walls hung sabres, kazák whips, nets for birds, fishing-nets and guns, cleverly carved powder-horns, gilded bits for horses, and hobble-chains with silver disks. The windows were small, with round, dull panes, such as are to be found nowadays only in ancient churches, through which it was impossible to see without raising the one movable pane. Around the windows and doors ran incised bands painted red. On shelves in the corners stood jugs, bottles and flasks of green and blue glass, carved silver cups, and gilded goblets of various makes,—Venetian, Turkish, Cherkessian,—which had arrived in Bulba's cottage by various roads, at third and fourth hand, something which was quite of common occurrence in those doughty days. There were birch benches all round the walls, a huge table under the holy pictures in the corner of honour, and a capacious oven all covered with parti-coloured tiles, with projections, recesses and an annex at the rear. All this was extremely familiar to our two young men, who had come home every year during the holidays—and had come because they had no horses, as yet, and