Nurse Hripsime turned her gaze to the vacant yard, and, shaking her head, said: 

“My dear son, the history of that house is as long as one of our fairy-tales.  One must tell for seven days and seven nights in order to reach the end.

“This yard was not always so desolate as you see it now,” she went on.  “Once there stood here a house, not very large, but pretty and attractive, and made of wood.  The wooden houses of former days pleased me much better than the present stone houses, which look like cheese mats outside and are prisons within.  An old proverb says, ’In stone or brick houses life goes on sadly,’

“Here, on this spot, next to the fig-tree,” she continued, “stood formerly a house with a five-windowed front, green blinds, and a red roof.  Farther back there by the acacias stood the stable, and between the house and the stable, the kitchen and the hen-house.  Here to the right of the gate a spring.”  With these words Nurse Hripsime took a step forward, looked about, and said:  “What is this? the spring gone, too!  I recollect as if to-day that there was a spring of sweet water on the very spot where I am standing.  What can have happened to it!  I know that everything can be lost—­but a spring, how can that be lost?” Hripsime stooped and began to scratch about with her stick.  “Look here,” she said suddenly, “bad boys have filled up the beautiful spring with earth and stones.  Plague take it!  Well, if one’s head is cut off, he weeps not for his beard.  For the spring I care not, but for poor Sarkis and his family I am very sorry.”

“Are you certain that the house of Sarkis, the grocer, stood here?  I had wholly forgotten it.  Now tell me, I pray, what has become of him?  Does he still live, or is he dead?  Where is his family?  I remember now that he had a pretty daughter and also a son.”

Nurse Hripsime gave no heed to my questions, but stood silently, poking about with her stick near the choked-up spring.

The picture of Grocer Sarkis, as we called him, took form vividly in my memory, and with it awoke many experiences of my childhood.  I remembered that when I was a child a dear old lady often visited us, who was continually telling us about Grocer Sarkis, and used to hold up his children as models.  In summer, when the early fruit was ripe, she used to visit his house, gather fruit in his garden, and would always come to us with full pockets, bringing us egg-plums, saffron apples, fig-pears, and many other fruits.  From that time we knew Sarkis, and when my mother wanted any little thing for the house I got it for her at his store.  I loved him well, this Sarkis; he was a quiet, mild man, around whose mouth a smile hovered.  “What do you want, my child?” he always asked when I entered his store.

“My mother sends you greeting,” I would answer.  “She wants this or that.”