id from the state and in the remote districts it was difficult to
secure teachers except in the pleasant summer months. The school term
could not begin earlier than July, for it must wait until crops were
laid by, for the students ranged in ages from six to twenty years, and
the larger boys were needed on the farms. Then it was the time for the
potatoes to be gathered, and tomatoes hung red upon the vine and were
ready for pulling. The fall period of the farm was on.

The progress which Sergeant York was able to make in all the years of
his school life would be about equal to the completion of the third
grade of a public school. He was not sufficiently advanced to become
interested in reading and self-instruction before he was called to the
army. He had been but a few miles away from the valley, where the men,
as do other men of the mountains, live in the open of the farm and
forest and think in terms of their environments. The need of an
education had not come home to him.

It was thus equipped that Sergeant York came into the presence of the
generals of the Allied armies and sat at banquet boards with the leading
men of this country in politics and business.

But never in the experiences that have been crowded into the past two
years of his life has he met a situation he could not command, or one
that broke his calmness and reserve.

Clearly and quickly he thinks, but those thoughts flow slowly into
words. He is keenly appreciative of his own limitations and quietly he
observes everything around him. From early childhood he had been taught
to be swift and keen in observation--the rustling of a leaf might be
related to a squirrel's presence, and behind each moving shadow there is
a cause and a meaning.

When he came to Prauthoy, France, the soldiers sought to honor him by
having him carry the Division flag in the horse show. All was new to him
and he was told but little of the routine expected of him. He had become
the man whom all the American soldiers wished to see, and his presence
was the feature of the occasion. The officers of his own regiment
watched him closely, and not a mistake did he make in all the day's
maneuvers. A comment of one of the officers was; "He seems always
instinctively to know the right thing to do."

He came from a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee but he was raised
under influences that make real men. A boy's ideal, in his early life,
is the father who guides him, and Sergeant York h