Finding my quarters in Julfa extremely inconvenient and small, I bought a little house and did it up after my own ideas of comfort. The place was originally two houses and formed the quarters of two sergeants, but by purchasing both houses, which I got for sixty pounds, _freehold_, with an indisputable title, I was able to make a very comfortable place indeed. I had two large and airy summer rooms, cool in the extreme, and admitting currents of air in every direction. A large anteroom opened into a smaller room, when the doors were closed nearly air-tight, with a large fireplace. This was my winter room; and in it I made a shutter opening into the anteroom by which meals were served without opening the door: these arrangements were needed, as Ispahan is bitterly cold in the winter. There were two cool upper rooms, one of which by a grated window looked on the street over the doorway. Besides this there were three warm and sheltered bedrooms on the ground floor of fair size, for winter, all with fireplaces. There was much good dry cellar accommodation, a good kitchen and servants’ quarters, a small garden in the outer courtyard shaded by trellised vines, and I planted about fifty fruit-trees, which cost from threepence to sixpence each, in the inner one. The whole was surrounded by a high wall of some twenty feet, built of mud bricks; around the inner side of the parallelogram formed by this outer wall were built the rooms. There were heavy wooden outer doors, and within them a large arched doorway where the business of the house, with tradesmen, forage-sellers, etc., was conducted. I had also a room for my dispensary, and a granary. And all this freehold for sixty pounds! Is it not a poor man’s paradise? On completing my purchase I proceeded to spend four hundred kerans, or sixteen pounds, in painting, plastering, wall-building; whitening or staining pale blue the interior of the rooms (the building was happily in thorough repair), paving my anteroom, six by four yards square, with white and blue encaustic tiles, kargilling or plastering with mud the whole outside of walls, roof, and rooms; putting in two windows of coloured glass, and painting, gilding, plastering, and decorating my dining or living room, and my best bedroom _de haut en bas_. In fine, for about eighty pounds, I had a freehold house, wind, water, and cold proof, with large and cool quarters in summer, or warm in winter, a paved courtyard; and the happy feeling that I was in my own place and could do what I pleased to it, and that anything that I did was not a case of _sic vos non vobis_.