drinkers go!
Step over step--day after day--with sleepless, tireless pace,
While the toper sometimes looks behind and tarries in the race!

Ah, heavily in the well-worn path poor Tom walked day by day,
For my heart-strings clung about his feet and tangled up the way;
The days were dark, and friends were gone, and life dragged on full slow,
And children came, like reapers, and to a harvest of want and woe!
Two of them died, and I was glad when they lay before me dead;
I had grown so weary of their cries--their pitiful cries for bread.

There came a time when my heart was stone; I could neither hope nor pray;
Poor Tom lay out in the Potter's Field, and my boy had gone astray;
My boy who'd been my idol, while, like hound athirst for blood,
Between my breaking heart and him the liquor seller stood,
And lured him on with pleasant words, his pleasures and his wine;
Ah, God have pity on other hearts as bruised and hurt as mine.

There were whispers of evil-doing, of dishonor, and of shame,
That I cannot bear to think of now, and would not dare to name!
There was hiding away from the light of day, there was creeping about at
night,
A hurried word of parting--then a criminal's stealthy flight!
His lips were white with remorse and fright when he gave me a good-by kiss;
And I've never seen my poor lost boy from that black day to this.

Ah, none but a mother can tell you, sir, how a mother's heart will ache,
With the sorrow that comes of a sinning child, with grief for a lost one's
sake,
When she knows the feet she trained to walk have gone so far astray,
And the lips grown bold with curses that she taught to sing and pray;
A child may fear--a wife may weep, but of all sad things, none other
Seems half so sorrowful to me as being a drunkard's mother.

They tell me that down in the vilest dens of the city's crime and murk,
There are men with the hearts of angels, doing the angels' work;
That they win back the lost and the straying, that they help the weak to
stand,
By the wonderful power of loving words--and the help of God's right hand!
And often and often, the dear Lord knows, I've knelt and prayed to Him,
That somewhere, somehow, 'twould happen that they'd find and save my Jim!

You'll say 'tis a poor old woman's whim; but when I prayed last night,
Right over yon eastern window there shone a wonderful light!
(Leastways it looked that way to me) and out of the light there fell
The softest voice I had ever he