both.

The old dealer sighed as they passed the murder counter. "Some of this
stock moves very slowly," he confessed. "Indeed it keeps me busy
now-a-days finding enough fresh stock to supply the demand."

Gud was a little puzzled over the nature of this business. "Your trade,"
he remarked, "is, I suppose, with the inhabitants of these neighboring
hells, supplying them with new kinds of sins?"

"No indeed," replied the dealer, who seemed a little insulted. "The
dwellers in hells are fed up on sin. I never deal with branded sinners.
I cater only to the best of righteous trade."

"Oh, I see, you bootleg sin in the heavens."

"No, no, I trade with mortals, and I sell only to the conscientious and
the righteous."

"And yet, you are stocked with every sin in the calendar; where is the
value to the righteous in such stock?"

"Merely a matter of time and place," explained the dealer, "and the
prevailing ethical ideas of my clients. You see my business is to buy up
the moral offal of one place or time and sell it at another time or
place when or where it has high value as virtue."

"Do you sell for cash or credit?"

"As I do not deal with hardened sinners who would admit the value of my
wares, but only with the righteous, I dare not give credit. But as for
cash, that is not practical either, as there can be no universal medium
of exchange between people whose fundamental ideas of morality
differ--so I am obliged to trade by barter."

"That must be troublesome."

"Yes," agreed the dealer, "relative values differ so--in some spheres a
murder is considered more than equal to a life time of dishonesty--in
other realms murder is considered an equitable payment for the mere
accusation of untruthfulness. But the exchange values of different kinds
of thefts bother me most, they are so illogical. I have one group of
clients who place a value on thievery in an inverse ratio to the size of
the theft. Only last week one of them who had robbed a nation swept by
winter winds of all its fuel resources wished to exchange his deed for
the idea of pilfering a lock of hair from the head of his neighbor's
wife. Indeed the difficulty of finding a logical ratio between the
immoral value of a theft and the value of the property stolen is one of
the most baffling problems in the mathematics of sin."

"A very interesting business you have," commented Gud, "and pray, how
came you to be in it?"

"It was my father's idea, for he was a grea