“This was true.  On the third day after receiving the goods, Sarkis had sold a bale of tobacco and a chest of tea, and had cut off several yards of cloth.  It was very singular that in the course of three months Sarkis had not once caught sight of Hemorrhoid Jack to call him to account for the delivery of the goods.  He had been several times to his house, where they said, ‘He is at the store.’  At the store they said Jack was at home.  It was very evident that he wished to defraud Sarkis.  After much talk back and forth the matter came into the courts, and since Sarkis had sold part of the goods and had given a receipt for them, he had to pay the sum demanded.

“For several months past business had been going very badly with the poor fellow and he could not raise the required sum, so he had to give up his property.  First they drove the poor man out of his house and emptied his store and his storehouse.  Then they sold the tobacco and the tea, for which no one would give more than fifty rubles, for both were half rotten.  The store and all that was in it were then auctioned off for a few hundred rubles, and finally the house was offered for sale.  No one would buy it, for among our people the praiseworthy custom rules that they never buy a house put up at auction till they convince themselves that the owner sells it of his own free-will.  The household furniture was also sold, and Sarkis became almost a beggar, and was obliged, half naked, to leave his house, with his wife and children.

“I proposed that they should occupy my house, but he would not have it.  ‘From to-day the black earth is my dwelling-place,’ he said, and rented a small house at the edge of the town near where the fields begin.

“When the neighbors found out the treachery of Hemorrhoid Jack, they were terribly angry, and one of them threw a note into his yard in which was written:  that if he took possession of poor Sarkis’s house they would tear or burn it down.  That was just what John wished, and he immediately sent carpenters to tear down the house and stable and then he sold the wood.

“At this time I became very sick and lay two months in bed.  When I got up again I thought to myself, ‘I must go and visit the poor wretches!’ I went to their little house, but found the door locked and the windows boarded up.  I asked a boy, ’My child, do you know where the people of this house are?’ ‘Two weeks ago they got into a wagon and drove away,’ answered the lad.  ‘Where are they gone?’ I asked.  ‘That I don’t know,’ he said.

“I would not have believed it, but an old woman came up to me on the street, of her own accord, and said: 

“‘They all got into a wagon and have moved away into a Russian village.’

“What the village was called she could not tell me, and so every trace of them was lost.