she who had loved and suffered most for me, and without a reproach, was never more to look upon me again or speak words of comfort and aid to my ears, so often unheeding.  At that moment, looking through scalding tears at her holy face, and afterwards when I heard the grave clods falling with their terrible sound upon her coffin lid, I swore that I would keep my promise, no matter what the temptation to break it might be.  She would not be here to see my triumph, but I would conquer for her memory’s sake, and all would be well.  I swore by earth, sea, and sky, never, never to break the promise made to her in the moment of her dying.  That promise I broke within two months from the day it was solemnized by my mother’s death.  I shudder still, remembering the agony of that fall.  Broken, oh God!—­the promise has been broken, is what first entered my mind.  Never before had I suffered as I then suffered.

My wild revel was protracted for days out of dread of the awful sorrow and remorse that I knew must surely come on my getting sober.  My mother appeared to me in my troubled dreams, and talked to me as in life.  Many times in my slumber, and in my waking fancies did I see her pale, troubled face, with her pitying eyes looking on me as from that bed of pain and death, and at such times I reached out my hands toward her in mute pleading for forgiveness, forgetting or not knowing that she was dead.  But the moment soon came when the truth was flashed through the blackness of night upon me, and then my misery was more than I could bear.  For years before her death I had lain in my bed and listened to her moaning in her troubled sleep, to the sighs which escaped from her heart and that of my father, and I promised the God of my hoped-for salvation that if he would only let me live I would no more give them pain.  Cold, clammy sweat broke out over my face, and my heart beat so low, and slow, and weak, that in very terror I felt that my eyeballs were bursting from my head.  Again and again I begged, and plead, and prayed that God would spare me and let me live until I could convince my father and mother that I never would drink again.  But my prayers were not answered.  My mother went out from me in fear, and dread, and doubt.  My father lives, but for me he has little or no hope.  If ever a mortal longed and yearned for one thing more than another in this uncertain existence, I long for a peaceful and quiet evening of life for my beloved father.  I implore the Father of all of us to give me grace and strength enough to keep sober until my remaining parent is fully persuaded that I am truly and beyond question saved from the curse which has driven me to an asylum, and well nigh sent him, a broken-hearted man, to his grave.  O for a strength which will forever enable me to resist the hell-born and hell-supported power of the fiend Alcohol!  Could I do this and have my father know it his dying hour would be full of sweet peace, and a joy so shining