Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/64

58 to bear a sort of universal resemblance to one another.

The elder, Ostap, began his career by running away in the course of the first year. He was brought back, terribly flogged, and set down again to his books. Four times did he bury his primer in the earth; and four times, after bestowing upon him an inhuman thrashing, did they buy him a new one. But he would have repeated his performance for the fifth time, doubtless, had not his father given him a solemn assurance that he would keep him at service in the monastery for twenty years, and had he not sworn to start with, that he should never behold Zaporozhe so long as he lived, unless he learned all the sciences in the academy. The odd point about it was, that he who said this was that same Taras Bulba who condemned all learning, and counselled his boys, as we have seen, not to trouble themselves about it at all. From that moment, Ostap began to sit over his tiresome books with extraordinary assiduity, and before long he stood on a level with the best. The style of education in that age was widely at variance with the manner of life: these scholastic, grammatical and theological subtleties never were used and never were met with in real life. Those who studied them—even the most scholastic of the lot—could never put their