left the shop upon the tips of his toes with a happy though
foolish expression all over his face, but the other went thoughtfully
away wearing a troubled and very puzzled look. Almost always it seemed
they did business in opposite evils.

But the thing that puzzled me most in all my talks with that unwieldy
man, the thing that puzzles me still, is that none that had once done
business in that shop ever returned again; a man might come day after
day for many weeks, but once do business and he never returned; so
much the old man told me, but when I asked him why, he only muttered
that he did not know.

It was to discover the wherefore of this strange thing and for no
other reason at all that I determined myself to do business sooner or
later in the little room at the back of that mysterious shop. I
determined to exchange some very trivial evil for some evil equally
slight, to seek for myself an advantage so very small as scarcely to
give Fate as it were a grip, for I deeply distrusted these bargains,
knowing well that man has never yet benefited by the marvellous and
that the more miraculous his advantage appears to be the more securely
and tightly do the gods or the witches catch him. In a few days more I
was going back to England and I was beginning to fear that I should be
sea-sick: this fear of sea-sickness, not the actual malady but only
the mere fear of it, I decided to exchange for a suitably little evil.
I did not know with whom I should be dealing, who in reality was the
head of the firm (one never does when shopping) but I decided that
neither Jew nor Devil could make very much on so small a bargain as
that.

I told the old man my project, and he scoffed at the smallness of my
commodity trying to urge me to some darker bargain, but could not move
me from my purpose. And then he told me tales with a somewhat boastful
air of the big business, the great bargains that had passed through
his hands. A man had once run in there to try and exchange death, he
had swallowed poison by accident and had only twelve hours to live.
That sinister old man had been able to oblige him. A client was
willing to exchange the commodity.

"But what did he give in exchange for death?" I said.

"Life," said that grim old man with a furtive chuckle.

"It must have been a horrible life," I said.

"That was not my affair," the proprietor said, lazily rattling
together as he spoke a little pocketful of twenty-franc pieces.

Strange