The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

WOMEN INVADING SALOONS.

579

In their despair, they organized themselves into visiting
companies of twenty, forty, sixty, or a hundred, and ", went
out on the street," two by two, and called on the saloon

keepers.
"Let us plead with them to abandon their ruinous business," was their womanly suggestion, "1 and narrate to thema
the unutterable woe they have
brought into our households! Let
l ' 1 'ius pray with
them, and sing
~~A4 hymns in the sa

loons, that are themselves
most earnest prayers!"
In an inconceivably short
time, the saloons of Southern
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
were invaded by a little army
of praying, pleading women, I
prairie fire. It was amazing
by these crusaders. To-day,

THE WOMEN'S TEMPERANCE CRUSADE.A BAND OF PRAYING WOMEN IN A SALOON.
I accompanied the women to the saloons, and
was an amazed spectator of the impression
they produced.
for the movement spread like
to behold the effects wrought
it would be said that they

hypnotized the saloon-keepers. For they dropped on their
knees, in many instances, beside the praying women, and
prayed for themselves. They signed total abstinence
pledges, and renounced liquor drinking and liquor selling
forever. They emptied into gutters and ditches their kegs
35