good game of poker, as well as bridge--though in the ten and a half
years that we were married I cannot remember that he played poker once
or bridge more than five times. He did, however, enjoy his bridge with
Simon Patton in Philadelphia; and when he played, he played well.

I tell you there was hardly anything the man could not do. He could draw
the funniest pictures you ever saw--I wish I could reproduce the letters
he sent his sons from the East. He was a good carpenter--the joy it
meant to his soul to add a second-hand tool ever so often to his
collection! Sunday morning was special carpenter-time--new shelves here,
a bookcase there, new steps up to the swimming-tank, etc. I have heard
many a man say that he told a story better than any one they ever heard.
He was an expert woodsman. And, my gracious! how he did love babies!
That hardly fits in just here, but I think of it now. His love for
children colored his whole economic viewpoint.

"There is the thing that possessed Parker--the perception of the
destructive significance of the repressed and balked instincts of the
migratory worker, the unskilled, the casuals, the hoboes, the womanless,
jobless, voteless men. To him their tragedy was akin to the tragedy of
child-life in our commercialized cities. More often than of anything
else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization
that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was
perpetually repressed and imperiled. The last time I saw him he was
flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed
by trucks and automobiles. What business had automobiles where children
should be free to play? What could be said for the human wisdom of a
civilization that placed traffic above child-life? In our denial to
children, to millions of men and women, of the means for satisfying
their instinctive desires and innate dispositions, he saw the principal