The fat-lamp, quivering and flaring up as though in fear of something,
lighted us within our cottage; the spindle hummed; and all of us
children, collected in a cluster, listened to grandfather, who had not
crawled off the oven for more than five years, owing to his great age.
But the wondrous tales of the incursions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,
the Poles, the bold deeds of Podkova, of Poltor-Kozhukh, and
Sagaidatchnii, did not interest us so much as the stories about some
deed of old which always sent a shiver through our frames, and made our
hair rise upright on our heads. Sometimes such terror took possession of
us in consequence of them, that, from that evening on, Heaven knows what
a marvel everything seemed to us. If you chance to go out of the cottage
after nightfall for anything, you imagine that a visitor from the other
world has lain down to sleep in your bed; and I should not be able to
tell this a second time were it not that I had often taken my own smock,
at a distance, as it lay at the head of the bed, for the Evil One rolled
up in a ball! But the chief thing about grandfather's stories was, that
he never had lied in all his life; and whatever he said was so, was so.
Pages:
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88