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 business I watched in that shop for the next few days, the exchange of odd commodities, and heard strange mutterings in corners amongst couples who presently rose and went to the back room, the old man following to ratify.

Twice a day for a week I paid my twenty francs, watching life with its great needs and its little needs morning and afternoon spread out before me in all its wonderful variety.

And one day I met a comfortable man with only a little need, he seemed to have the very evil I wanted.  He always feared the lift was going to break.  I knew too much of hydraulics to fear things as silly as that, but it was not my business to cure his ridiculous fear.  Very few words were needed to convince him that mine was the evil for him, he never crossed the sea, and I on the other hand could always walk upstairs, and I also felt at the time, as many must feel in that shop, that so absurd a fear could never trouble me.  And yet at times it is almost the curse of my life.  When we both had signed the parchment in the spidery back room and the old man