the inscrutable ways of God.





The Bureau d'Echange de Maux

I often think of the Bureau d'Echange de Maux and the wondrously evil
old man that sate therein. It stood in a little street that there is
in Paris, its doorway made of three brown beams of wood, the top one
overlapping the others like the Greek letter _pi_, all the rest
painted green, a house far lower and narrower than its neighbours and
infinitely stranger, a thing to take one's fancy. And over the doorway
on the old brown beam in faded yellow letters this legend ran, Bureau
Universel d'Echanges de Maux.

I entered at once and accosted the listless man that lolled on a stool
by his counter. I demanded the wherefore of his wonderful house, what
evil wares he exchanged, with many other things that I wished to know,
for curiosity led me; and indeed had it not I had gone at once from
that shop, for there was so evil a look in that fattened man, in the
hang of his fallen cheeks and his sinful eye, that you would have said
he had had dealings with Hell and won the advantage by sheer
wickedness.

Such a man was mine host; but above all the evil of him lay in his
eyes, which lay so still, so apathetic, that you would have sworn that
he was drugged or dead; like lizards motionless on a wall they lay,
then suddenly they darted, and all his cunning flamed up and revealed