north. But the Tartar, if he slipped out from the Black
Forest or crossed the Dniester from the Wallachian side,
came by the southern provinces together with the birds.

That winter, however, the birds did not come with their
uproar to the Commonwealth. It was stiller on the steppe
than usual. At the moment when our narrative begins the
sun was just setting, and its reddish rays threw light on
a land entirely empty. On the northern rim of the Wil-
derness, along the Omelnik to its mouth, the sharpest
eye could not discover a living soul, nor even a move-
ment in the dark, dry, and withered steppe grass. The
sun showed but half its shield from behind the horizon.
The heavens became obscured, and then tho steppe grew
darker and darker by degrees. Near the left bank, on a
small height resembling more a grave-mound than a hill,
were the mere remnants of a walled stanitsa which once
upon a time had been built by Fedor Buchatski and then
torn down by raids. A long shadow stretched from this
ruin. In the distance gleamed the waters of the wide-
spread Omelnik, which in that place turned toward the
Dnieper. But the lights went out each moment in the
heavens and on the earth. From the sky were heard
the cries of storks in their flight to the sea; with this
exception the stillness was unbroken by a sound.

Night came down upon the Wilderness, and with it the
hour of ghosts. Cossacks on guard in the stanitsas related
in those days that the shades of men who had fallen in
sudden death and in sin used to rise up at night and carry
on dances in which they were hindered neither by cross
nor church. Also, when the wicks which showed the time
of midnight began to burn out, prayers for the dead were
offered throughout the stanitsas. It was said, too, that the
shades of mounted men coursing through the waste barred
the road to wayfarers, whining and begging them for a sign
of the holy cross. Among these ghosts vampires also were
met with, who pursued people with howls. A trained ear
might distinguish at a distance the howls of a vampire
from those of a wolf. Whole legions of shadows were also
seen, which sometimes came so near the stanitsas that the
sentries sounded the alarm. This was generally the har-
binger of a great war.

The meeting of a single ghost foreboded no good, either;
but it was not always necessarily of evil omen, for fre-
quently a living man would appear before travellers and