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My Mother in Jail

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 20, 1882

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 8, No. 16.

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"My Mother in Jail."

By The Watchword

"Did you put my mother in jail?" asked a little tot of a girl, while she pushed her sunbonnet back, and looked from one officer to another, as she stood in the Philadelphia Central Police Station. She was but a child, so young that she could hardly speak plainly, and so small that a policeman had to help her up the steps at the station house.
"Did you put my mother in jail?" The officers stared at the little waif; they had arrested a tangle-haired woman who spoke four languages in her rage, and fought the officers like a fury, and they did not dream that this was her child; but it was.
The little thing seemed so innocent and pure. They did not want her to see her mother caged like a wild beast behind iron bars; but the mother heard her voice and called for her, and so they swung open the corridor door and let the little creature in. She went to the cell door, looked in and cried:--
"Why mother, are you in jail?"
The mother shrank back ashamed, and the child dropped on her knees upon the stone floor, clung to the iron door, and prayed:--
"Now I lay me down to sleep, and I hope my mother will be let out of jail."
The strong men had a strange moisture about their eyes as they gently led the little thing away; and when the case came into Court, his honor whispered to the woman to go home, and, for her child's sake, behave as a mother should. Perhaps she will do so—unless she will meet with some one licensed to deal out for "the public good" that which makes fathers act like brutes, and mothers forget the sucking child. Perhaps she will prove a true mother—unless some honored and respected citizen gets her crazy on a dram, on which he makes a profit of six cents. Strange things are done in this world; but few are more strange than the wonders wrought by this devil's draught, which in an hour turns love to hate, calmness to frenzy, quiet to confusion, and a mother to a fiend.