Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/98

 rejection, there was a letter; the editor liked the story, saw much in it, he said, but felt—and quite rightly I am sure—that its ending, with the convict dying in the very nick of time to save the governor from his embarrassment, was an evasion of the whole moral issue; besides, the conclusion was too melodramatic,—that was the word he used,—and would I change it?

The day after all was bright and cheerful; I remember it well, the sun lying on the State House lawns, their green dotted with the gold of dandelions, and the trees twisting their leaves almost rapturously in a sparkling air we did not often breathe on those humid prairies. And—though this has nothing whatever to do with the case, and enters it only as one of those incidents that linger in the memory—William Jennings Bryan was there that day, calling on the Governor and the Secretary of State. He was then a young congressman from Nebraska, and he made a speech; but I was interested in the story far more than in politics or any speech about it, even the brilliant speech of a man who so soon, and with such remarkable élan, was to charge across the country on the hosts of privilege.

And I changed the story; I made that poor harried governor drain his bitter cup of duty to the lees, and gave the story an ending so remorselessly logical, so true to the facts and fates of human experience, that it might have been as depressing as one of Hardy's "Little Ironies"—could it have resembled them in any other way, which of course it could not, unless it were in that imitation with which the last