it.

There were four or five men in the dingy ends of that low-ceilinged
room who gesticulated and muttered softly in twos as men who make a
bargain, and now and then more came in, and the eyes of the flabby
owner of the house leaped up at them as they entered, seemed to know
their errands at once and each one's peculiar need, and fell back
again into somnolence, receiving his twenty francs in an almost
lifeless hand and biting the coin as though in pure absence of mind.

"Some of my clients," he told me. So amazing to me was the trade of
this extraordinary shop that I engaged the old man in conversation,
repulsive though he was, and from his garrulity I gathered these
facts. He spoke in perfect English though his utterance was somewhat
thick and heavy; no language seemed to come amiss to him. He had been
in business a great many years, how many he would not say, and was far
older than he looked. All kinds of people did business in his shop.
What they exchanged with each other he did not care except that it had
to be evils, he was not empowered to carry on any other kind of
business.

There was no evil, he told me, that was not negotiable there; no evil
the old man knew had ever been taken away in despair from his shop. A
man might have to wait and come back again next day, and next day and
the day after, paying twenty francs each time, but the old man had the
addresses of all his clients and shrewdly knew their needs, and soon
the right two met and eagerly exchanged their commodities.
"Commodities" was the old man's terrible word, said with a gruesome
smack of his heavy lips, for he took a pride in his business and evils
to him were goods.

I learned from him in ten minutes very much of human nature, more than
I have ever learned from any other man; I learned from him that a
man's own evil is to him the worst thing there is or ever could be,
and that an evil so unbalances all men's minds that they always seek
for extremes in that small grim shop. A woman that had no children had
exchanged with an impoverished half-maddened creature with twelve. On
one occasion a man had exchanged wisdom for folly.

"Why on earth did he do that?" I said.

"None of my business," the old man answered in his heavy indolent way.
He merely took his twenty francs from each and ratified the agreement
in the little room at the back opening out of the shop where his
clients do business. Apparently the man that had parted with wisdom
had