Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/48

42 full force of the speechless grief that seemed to quiver in her eyes and on her lips, which were convulsively pressed together.

Bulba was terribly headstrong. His was one of those characters which could arise only in that troublous sixteenth century, in that half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern, primeval Russia, deserted by its Princes, was laid waste, burned to ashes by savage hordes of Mongolian bandits; when a man, deprived of house and home became recklessly brave here; when, amid conflagrations, in sight of threatening neighbours, and eternal danger, he settled down and grew used to looking them squarely in the face, having unlearned the knowledge that there was such a thing as fear in the world; when the ancient, peaceable Slav spirit was seized with a warlike flame, and there was instituted Kazakdom,—a free, wild manifestation of Russian nature,—and when all the river-country, the lands down stream, the slopes of the river banks and convenient sites were populated by kazáks whose number no man knew, and whose bold comrades had a right to reply to the Sultan's inquiry as to how many there were of them, "Who knows? We are scattered all over the steppe: wherever there is a hillock, there, also is a Kazák." It was, in fact, a most remarkable manifestation of Russian