“But it isn’t all so funny,” he said gravely after keeping them in a roar for half an hour. “In a State as big as this a good many disagreeable things happen, and people come to me every day with heart-breaking stories. There’s nothing that causes me more anxiety than the appeals for pardon; if the pardoning power were taken away from me, I’d be a much happier man. The Board of Pardons winnows out the cases, but even at that there’s enough to keep me uncomfortable. It isn’t the pleasantest feeling in the world that as you go to bed at night somebody may be suffering punishment unjustly, and that it’s up to you to find it out. When a woman comes in backed by a child or two and cries all over your office about her husband who’s doing time and tells you he wasn’t guilty, it doesn’t cheer you much; not by a jugful! Wives, mothers, and sisters: the wives shed more tears, the sisters put up the best argument, but the mothers give you more sleepless nights.” “If it were up to me,” commented Burgess, “I’m afraid I’d turn ’em all out!” “You would,” chorused the table derisively, “and when you’d emptied the penitentiaries you’d burn ’em down!” “Of course there’s bound to be cases of flagrant injustice,” suggested Kemp. “And the feelings of a man who is locked up for a crime he never committed must be horrible. We hear now and then of such cases and it always shakes my faith in the law.” “The law does the best it can,” replied the governor a little defensively, “but, as you say, mistakes do occur. The old saying that murder will out is no good; we can all remember cases where the truth was never known. Mistakes occur constantly, and it’s the fear of not rectifying them that’s making a nervous wreck of me. I have in my pocket now a blank pardon that I meant to sign before I left my office, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to the point. The Pardon Board has made the recommendation, not on the grounds of injustice--more, I’m afraid, out of sympathy than anything else--and we have to be careful of our sympathies in these matters. And here again there’s a wife to reckon with. She’s been at my office nearly every day for a year, and she’s gone to my wife repeatedly to enlist her support. And it’s largely through Mrs. Eastman’s insistence that I’ve spent many weeks studying the case. It’s a murder: what appeared to be a heartless, cold-blooded assassination. And some of you may recall it--the Avery case, seven years ago, in Salem County.” Half the men had never heard of it and the others recalled it only vaguely.