Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/103

 *stoy and the other great Russians, and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more anxious to save him.

When Joe Gill's tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an old friend to spare the boy's life.

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