"Speaking o' Don Cossacks," said he, starting off without further preamble, and clanking his enormous spurs; "it was just this time thirty years ago that we sacked Smolensko and Kiow, after storming them from the Polanders. Dags and pistols! but my squadron of Cossacks shewed themselves born deevils that day. Sabre and spear was the cry. Some braw pickings we got, your ladyships, in that same province of Lithuania, which to an industrious cavalier, who knoweth the fashion of war, is as fine a place for free inquartering as the Garden of Eden would have been, d--n me!"
"Oh! Sir Thomas," said Lady Grisel deprecatingly. "But is it true that in Muscovy no man will either beck, bow, or veil bonnet to a woman in the streets?"
"I hope no true-born Russ would undervalue himsel' so far," replied Sir Thomas, stroking his silver beard. "He would as soon put his head in the fire as bend it to any woman, his ain mother even; and as for adoring beauty--udsdaggers! a Muscovite would sooner think of adoring his horse's tail. I assure you, ladies, that the great Duke of Muscovy himsel' would not permit his mother, wife, or daughter to eat at the same buird wi' him, even if it were to save their lives. 'Tis the law o' the land, and a very gude ane too."
Here the old ladies held up their hands and eyes, but the General continued.
"They are fine cheilds those same Russians though, and I will at one sliver cut the throat of any loon that gainsayeth it. Had your ladyships seen Salcroff's Black Cuirassiers sweeping ten thousand wild Tartars before them, and driving them with levelled lances into the foaming waters of the Vistula, it would have been a sight to mind o'. Udsdaggers! that was different work from riding owre a band o' puir psalm-singing deevils o' Covenanters, just as ane would trot owre a corn-rig. Ay, _those_ were the days, and _that_ was the service, for a pretty man! My Lord President, play if it please you."
"You are an awfu' man, Binns," said Mersington; "a perfect auld deil's buckie, and weel kent to be a most unrelenting tulzier, that caresna whether a man crieth _quarter_ in our decent Scots' tongue, or in that o' an Englishman, Tartar, or other unco body, death being the doom o' all alike."