“Begone and quit my sight,” he cries in accents stern and grim,
“You’ve streaked my hair with grey that day you fled away with him,
You broke your poor old mother’s heart, her eyes in death are dim,
Begone, you are no longer child of mine!”
But his heart goes back with anguish to the child that he loved best,
The daughter fair and stainless ere she left the parent nest,
And for her dear dead mother’s sake he clasps her to his breast,
To err is human, to forgive divine!
Stitching, stitching, in poverty and in pain,
A woman’s toiling to earn her children bread;