people who pass their days as do those who now live
in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from
invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free
from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from
solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley,
will be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty--a people who find in
the changes of the weather and its effect upon crops their chief cause
for worry.

Through the gray dawn the farmer looks up to the skies for his weather
report for the day. As he works he watches the clouds scurrying across
the mountaintops, and when he notes they are banking against the unseen
summit of the Blue Mountains that rises to the east, he knows that rain
is soon to come. Some local unknown bard, watching those banking clouds,
has left a lyric to his people, and I heard a gray-bearded mountaineer
singing it as he predicted the break of a summer drought:

"The sun rose bright
But hid its head soon,
'Twill rain a-fore night
Ef hit don't rain a-fore noon."

With their homes back in the mountains nearly fifty miles from the
railway, with a journey before them over rocky roads and up
mountainsides to the other communities of Fentress county, the people of
Pall Mall live in the communion and democracy of one great family.
Children call old men by their Christian names. In it is not the
slightest element of disrespect, and it is instead an appreciated
propriety which the old men recall as the custom of their boyhood. Rev.
R. C. Pile, pastor of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, the
church of the valley, is "Rosier" to everyone. All worship together in
the same church; all toil alike in the fields. In the predial, peaceful
routine of their days there is a positive similarity. A farmer will ride
direct to the cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, knowing the
neighbor will be found at work there. And, as through the gray dawn of
the day they look up to the skies, the wish of one for rain will be
found to be the community desire.

The social meeting-point of the people of the valley is the general
store of John Marion Rains. The storehouse sits by the roadside at the
foot of a mountain in the western end of the valley, just where the road
tumbles down to the solid log cabin old Coonrod Pile had built, to the
spring and the York home.

One end of the long porch of the store-house, as it runs with the road,