Sometimes Old Man Murtrie would wake up and turn over on his couch and see God and Death and the Devil sitting in a row on the prescription counter, looking at him. But he always persuaded himself that it was a sort of dream, induced by the “medicine” he took; and he would take another dose of his “medicine” and go back to sleep again. He never spoke to them when he waked, but just lay on his cot and stared at them; and if they spoke to him he would pretend to himself that they had not spoken. For it was absurd to think that God and Death and the Devil could really be sitting there, in the dim greenish gaslight, among all the faintly radiant bottles, talking to each other and looking at him; and so Old Man Murtrie would not believe it. When he first began taking his “medicine” Old Man Murtrie took it in the form of a certain patent preparation which was full of opium. He wanted the opium more and more after he started, but he pretended to himself that he did not know there was much opium in that medicine. Then, when a federal law banished that kind of medicine from the markets, he took to making it for his own use. He would not take opium outright, for that would be to acknowledge to himself that he was an opium eater; he thought eating opium was a sin, and he thought of himself as sinless. But to make the medicine with the exact formula that its manufacturers had used, before they had been compelled to shut up shop, and use it, did not seem to him to be the same thing at all as being an opium eater. And yet, after the law was passed, abolishing the medicine, he would not sell to any one else what he made for himself; his conscience would not allow him to do so. Therefore, he must have known that he was eating opium at the same time he tried to fool himself about it. God and the Devil used to discuss the ethics of this attitude towards the “medicine,” and Old Man Murtrie would sometimes pretend to be asleep and would listen to them. “He knows it is opium all right,” God would say. “He is just lying to himself about it. He ought to go to Hell. No one that lies to himself that way can get into Heaven.” “He's pretending for the sake of society in general and for the sake of religion,” the Devil would say. “If he admitted to himself that it was opium and if he let the world know that he took opium, it might bring discredit on the church that he loves so well. He might become a stumbling block to others who are seeking salvation, and who seek it through the church. He is willing to sacrifice himself so as not to hamper others in their religious life. For my part, I think it is highly honorable of him, and highly virtuous. No person as moral as that in his instincts can get into Hell.” “Talk, talk, talk!” Death would say. “The trouble with you two is that neither one of you wants Old Man Murtrie around where you will have to look at him through all eternity, and each of you is trying to put it on moral grounds.”