bout
them!

No one could have recognised the village of ours a little over a hundred
years ago; it was a hamlet, the poorest kind of a hamlet. Half a score
of miserable farmhouses, unplastered and badly thatched, were scattered
here and there about the fields. There was not a yard or a decent shed
to shelter animals or waggons. That was the way the wealthy lived:
and if you had looked for our brothers, the poor--why, a hole in the
ground--that was a cabin for you! Only by the smoke could you tell that
a God-created man lived there. You ask why they lived so? It was not
entirely through poverty: almost every one led a raiding Cossack life,
and gathered not a little plunder in foreign lands; it was rather
because it was little use building up a good wooden house. Many
folk were engaged in raids all over the country--Crimeans, Poles,
Lithuanians! It was quite possible that their own countrymen might make
a descent and plunder everything. Anything was possible.

In this hamlet a man, or rather a devil in human form, often made his
appearance. Why he came, and whence, no one knew. He prowled about, got
drunk, and suddenly disappeared as if into the air, leaving no trace
of his existence. Then, behold, he seemed to have dropped from the sky
again, and went flying about the street of the village, of which no
trace now remains, and which was not more than a hundred paces from
Dikanka. He would collect together all the Cossacks he met; then
there were songs, laughter, and cash in plenty, and vodka flowed like
water.... He would address the pretty girls, and give them ribbons,
earrings, strings of beads--more than they knew what to do with. It
is true that the pretty girls rather hesitated about accepting his
presents: God knows, perhaps, what unclean hands they had passed
through. My grandfather's aunt, who kept at that time a tavern, in which
Basavriuk (as they called this devil-man) often caroused, said that no
consideration on the earth would have induced her to accept a gift from
him. But then, again, how avoid accepting? Fear seized on every one when
he knit his shaggy brows, and gave a sidelong glance which might send
your feet God knows whither: whilst if you did accept, then the next
night some fiend from the swamp, with horns on his head, came and began
to squeeze your neck, if there was a string of beads upon it; or bite
your finger, if there was a ring upon it; or drag you by the hair, if
ribbons were braided in it.