Zelezniak

AU who were not of the Greek religion, aged men, women, children, nobles, serfs, monks, tillers of the soil, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, all were slaughtered indiscriminately. The entire province presented the spectacle of a town taken by storm. Cossack and rebel-serf vied with each other in acts of merciless cruelty: deep wells were filled up with the dead bodies of infants; nobles, females, and priests, were buried in the ground up to the chin, while the assassin torturers danced around them to the sound of music, amusing themselves at intervals with mowing off the heads of their victims, like the grass of the field. On the same gibbet were seen mothers and their children. Other details of the barbarous cruelty practised on females, and related by historians, are of too horrid and revolting a character, to bear more minute description. They hanged likewise upon the same tree on the public highway, a Polish nobleman, a priest, a protestant, and a dog, with the inscription " one and the same, Children of tender years were fastened alive to other sufferers, thus to perish by a slow and dreadful death; or, being incapable of resistance, while they were firmly held, they were poinarded or deprived of their eyes by Cossack boys not more than ten years of age. But here we must pause, the pen shrinks from tracing such inhuman deeds. The Jews, abominated more than others on account of their religion, were almost all burned alive; nor did even the abjuration of their religion secure them from the stake. In the villages lay murdered women, and the mutilated trunks of adults and children crushed by the ironbound hoofs of the horses. All to whom flight was possible, sought a doubtful safety in remote places; while the whole of the nobles scattered throughout the Ukraine, fell. Examples were not wanting of serfs defending their masters with the utmost devotedness and bravery; most of the villages were taken by assault and burned to ashes; the inhabitants being slaughtered. A remnant of the Polish nobility took refuge at Houmagne, the principal fortified town of the southern part of the Ukraine, in which were stationed some Polish Cossacks under Gonta, and a few other soldiers. A dark plot was formed for taking it by surprise, and the undertaking unhappily succeeded through the treachery of Gonta. Under pretext of revictualling the town, Zelezniaque, with his ferocious bands, was introduced into it, at nightfall, by his agents; and, after a short resistance, eighteen thousand inhabitants were put to the sword. The slaughter lasted three days: atrocities which no power of language can describe were committed; and while the massacre was being accomplished, the Russian priests pronounced blessings and chaunted h}Tnns of triumph.