One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she had the sickness that killed her." [Illustration: YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.] It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of hers."