Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/86

80 had not passed into the hands of the shopkeepers and dram-shop keepers. There was a certain fascination about this universal revelry. It was not an assembly of topers, who drank to drown sorrow, but simply a wild revelry of joy. Every one who came thither forgot everything, abandoned everything which had hitherto interested him. He—so to speak—spat on all his past, and gave himself up recklessly to freedom and the good-fellowship of men of the same stamp as himself,—revellers, who had neither relatives nor home, nor family,—nothing save the free sky and the eternal feast of their souls. This gave rise to that wild gaiety which could not have come from any other source. The tales and chatter among the assembled crowd which reposed lazily on the ground were often so droll, and breathed forth such a power of vivid narration, that it required all the indifferent exterior cultivated by a Zaporozhetz to maintain his immovable expression of countenance, without so much as a twitch of the moustache,—a sharply-accentuated peculiarity which to this day distinguishes the Southern Russian from his brethren. It was drunken, noisy mirth; but withal it was no black ale-house, where a man forgets himself in darkly-seducing merriment: it was an intimate circle of schoolboys.

The only difference was, that, instead of sitting