At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative, and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before. But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced, namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on and trying to write one that is?” I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if not in confidence. XVI