Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/97

 and at last when the morning had almost worn away I went over to his chambers to add another fardel to that heavy load which I had thought it was to be my lot that day to see lightened in the doing of an act of grace and pity. I told him as he sat alone at his desk, and the shade of sorrow deepened a moment on his pale face; but he said nothing, and I was glad to go.

The poor little tragedy had its impressions for me, and it was not long until I thought I saw in it the motive of a story, which at once I began to write. The theme was the embarrassment which a governor's conscience created for him because during a critical campaign he knew it to be his duty to pardon a notorious convict,—and I invented the situations and expedients to bear the tale along to that thrilling climax in which the governor was delivered out of his difficulty by the most opportune death of the convict, whom a higher hand could dramatically be said to have pardoned. I worked very hard on the story, and thought it pretty fine, and I sent it away at last to an eastern magazine. And then I waited, and at length a letter came saying that the story was well enough thought of in that editorial room to hold it until the editor-in-chief should return from Europe and hand down a final decision. I waited for weeks, and then one morning there on my desk was an envelope, ominous in its bigness; it was one of those letters you do not have to open in order to read them, because you know what they say; I knew my manuscript had come back. But when I opened the package, instead of the familiar slip of