Perhaps it was just the drink that made him think of leaving so early.”

From the heights of the sky the moon illuminated the whole courtyard filled with sleeping men and the thick clumps of pussy willow and tall steppe grass that engulfed the paling around the yard. She sat by the heads of her sweet sons without taking her eyes from them for even an instant and without thinking of sleep. The horses, sensing the approach of dawn, had stopped grazing and lay down on the grass. The upper leaves of the pussy willows began to whisper, and gradually the whispering began to descend. She sat there until daybreak, not in the least tired, wishing deep inside that the night would last much longer. The gentle neighing of a foal sounded from the steppes. Strips of red stretched across the sky.

Bulba suddenly awoke and jumped to his feet. He remembered everything he had ordered done the night before.

“Well, my boys, you’ve had your share of sleep! Come on, it’s time to get going! Water the horses! Where’s the old woman?” (That was how he usually referred to his wife.) “Get a move on, old woman! Fix us something to eat—we have a long road ahead of us!”

The poor old woman, robbed of her last hopes, dragged herself dejectedly into the hut. Weeping, she busied herself preparing breakfast while Bulba shouted orders and headed to the stables to choose the best bridles for his sons’ horses. The young Seminary students had undergone quite a transformation. Instead of their old, bespattered boots, they were now wearing new red ones of morocco leather reinforced with silver studs, and their trousers, wide as the Black Sea, with a thousand folds and pleats, were belted with a golden sash from which hung a long strap with tassels and other trinkets and to which their gunpowder horns were tied. Their scarlet Cossack jackets, the cloth bright as fire, were girded with ornate belts in which richly carved Turkish pistols were stuck. Their sabers swung against their legs. Their faces, little burnt by the sun, seemed handsomer and whiter, and their young black mustaches somehow underlined the paleness of the healthy, robust color of their youth. Their faces were striking beneath their tall, black, golden-topped lambskin hats. Their poor mother! She looked at them and could not utter a word, her tears trapped within her eyes.

“Well, my sons, everything is ready! There’s no point lingering!” Bulba finally pronounced. “Now, as Christian custom has it, we must all sit together one last time before we leave.”

And they all sat down together, even the lackeys who had been standing reverently by the doors.

“Lay a blessing upon your children, Mother!” Bulba told his wife. “Pray to God that they fight with valor, that they will always defend their knightly honor, and that they will always fight for the True Faith—for if they do not, it would be better for them not to walk the earth! Go to your mother, my sons: a mother’s prayer can save a man both on water and on land.”

Their weak and sobbing mother embraced them as only a mother can, and hung two small icons around their necks.

“May the Mother of God … protect you … and do not forget your own mother, my darling sons … send word to me that you are well.…” She was not able to speak further.

“Let’s go, my boys!” Bulba shouted.

The saddled horses stood in front of the door. Bulba jumped onto Devil, who suddenly veered to the side, feeling the twenty-pood load on his back, for Bulba was uncommonly stout and brawny.*

When the mother saw that her sons were already mounted, she rushed forward to the younger, whose features still retained a kind of tenderness. She grabbed the stirrup, and clung to his saddle with desperation in her eyes. Two burly Cossacks carefully pulled her away and carried her into the house. But as they rode out of the gate she came rushing out with the lightness of a wild goat, unimaginable at her age, held one of the horses with incomprehensible strength, and embraced her son with blind, crazed fervor. She was again carried into the house.

The young Cossacks rode off sadly, holding back their tears out of fear of their father, who was perturbed himself, although he struggled not to show it. It was a gray day. The green steppes glittered brightly. Birds chattered discordantly. After they had ridden awhile they looked back. It was as if their homestead had sunk into the steppes. All that could be seen above the grass were the two chimneys of their modest house and the tops of the trees, on the branches of which they had once climbed like squirrels. All they saw before them now, stretching out into the endless distance, was the steppe, calling to their minds the whole story of their lives, from the years when they had rolled about in the dew-wet grass to the years when they lay in wait for black-browed Cossack maidens who bolted over these steppes on fresh and nimble legs.