But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and waited for her.  All through those weary years, whenever she read in the local paper of some poor girl’s body being found in the river, some poor suicide, who had leapt,

    “Mad from life’s history,
     Swift to death’s mystery,
     Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,”

that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—­if she could afford it—­or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, “No, it ain’t my child,” and return again to her watching and waiting.

“Once, ma’am,” she said, “I had a dream.  I saw a beautiful place, all bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl.  She came straight to me, and said, ‘Oh, mother, don’t fret; I’m safe and I’m happy!’ and with those words in my ears I awoke.  That dream has been a great comfort to me, ma’am; I feel sure God sent it to me.  But oh, ma’am,” she exclaimed, with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent entreaty, “the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin’, if you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin’s, ’Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah Smith?’ As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of her that way.”

Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms asking my large audiences, “Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah Smith?” And I was dumb.  I had not a word of comfort to give her.  I had heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my question, “Does your mother know where you are?” “Oh, no; I couldn’t bear that mother should know about me!”—­not to know what the fate of that young girl had been.  She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class girls disappear and are lost.  Possibly she had been sent out of the country, and was in some foreign den.  One’s best hope was that she was dead.

But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.  Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a gravestone; and I think no woman—­no mother, at least—­but will agree with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand off.  Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the dumb tears