fter making several
detours, into a dark, narrow street bearing the names of the Muddy and
also of the Jews' street, because Jews from nearly every part of Warsaw
were to be found here. This street greatly resembled a back-yard turned
wrong side out. The sun never seemed to shine into it. The black wooden
houses, with numerous poles projecting from the windows, still further
increased the darkness. Rarely did a brick wall gleam red among them;
for these too, in many places, had turned quite black. Here and there,
high up, a bit of stuccoed wall illumined by the sun glistened with
intolerable whiteness. Pipes, rags, shells, broken and discarded tubs:
every one flung whatever was useless to him into the street, thus
affording the passer-by an opportunity of exercising all his five senses
with the rubbish. A man on horseback could almost touch with his hand
the poles thrown across the street from one house to another, upon which
hung Jewish stockings, short trousers, and smoked geese. Sometimes a
pretty little Hebrew face, adorned with discoloured pearls, peeped out
of an old window. A group of little Jews, with torn and dirty garments
and curly hair, screamed and rolled about in the dirt. A red-haired Jew,
with freckles all over his face which made him look like a sparrow's
egg, gazed from a window. He addressed Yankel at once in his gibberish,
and Yankel at once drove into a court-yard. Another Jew came along,
halted, and entered into conversation. When Bulba finally emerged from
beneath the bricks, he beheld three Jews talking with great warmth.

Yankel turned to him and said that everything possible would be done;
that his Ostap was in the city jail, and that although it would be
difficult to persuade the jailer, yet he hoped to arrange a meeting.

Bulba entered the room with the three Jews.

The Jews again began to talk among themselves in their incomprehensible
tongue. Taras looked hard at each of them. Something seemed to have
moved him deeply; over his rough and stolid countenance a flame of hope
spread, of hope such as sometimes visits a man in the last depths of his
despair; his aged heart began to beat violently as though he had been a
youth.

"Listen, Jews!" said he, and there was a triumphant ring in his words.
"You can do anything in the world, even extract things from the bottom
of the sea; and it has long been a proverb, that a Jew will steal from
himself if he takes a fancy to steal. Set my Ostap at lib