Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/85

 III

ARAS BULBA and his sons had been in the Syech about a week. Ostap and Andríi occupied themselves very little with the school of war. The Syech was not fond of troubling itself with warlike exercises and wasting time. The young generation grew up, and learned these by experience alone, in the very heat of battles, which were, accordingly, almost incessant. The kazáks thought it a nuisance to fill up the intervals of this instruction with any sort of drill, except, perhaps, shooting at a target, and, on rare occasions, with horse-racing and wild-beast hunts on the steppe and in the forests. All the rest of the time they devoted to revelry,—a sign of the wide diffusion of spiritual liberty. The Syech, as a whole, presented an unusual phenomenon: it was a sort of unbroken revel; a ball noisily begun, which had lost its end. Some busied themselves with crafts, others kept little shops and traded; but the majority caroused from morning until night, if the wherewithal jingled in their pockets, and if the booty they had captured