For once these well-trained domestics showed signs of surprise, and hesitated.

Their master frowned.

Snatching a hammer from one of them, he himself attacked the great statue as if it were a personal foe.

The Armenians, seeing he was in earnest, returned to their usual habits of passive obedience, and aided him in his labour.

Within a few minutes the great and beautiful figure lay in fragments on the floor, and these fragments were soon crushed into indistinguishable atoms.