wing the Civil War.

As his residence on his new farm was yet to be built for him, he carried
his bride back to the valley and to the little two-room cabin that had
been his mother's and his home.

It was impossible for Sergeant York to accept all of the invitations he
received to visit cities and address conventions, and he had often to
disappoint delegations who traveled the long, rough mountain road to
urge in person his acceptance. And he could not, with a slow-moving pen
upon a table of pine, answer all the communications that came. Before
the war two letters for him in half a year was an occasion worthy of
comment. Now each day, over the mountains upon a pacing roan, the
postman came, and the mail-pouches, swung as saddle-bags, swayed in
unison with the horse's step. Most of the letters were for the York
home.

The public mind pays tribute to its heroes in ways that are odd. In the
growing mass of mail that was kept in a wide wooden box under the
bed--letters that in number "had got away" from the Sergeant's ability
to answer--there were displayed many mental idiosyncrasies and an
abundance of advice, and there were many strange requests. Some of them
were pathetic begging letters, as tho the Sergeant were a rich man; some
came from prison-cells, asking his influence to secure a pardon; some
from those still desirous of securing a business partnership with him.
Among them were even belated matrimonial proposals, describing the
writers' attractive qualities. These the big Sergeant teasingly turned
over to the golden-haired girl who, herself, had come but recently into
that home, and they may safely be classed among those letters the
Sergeant could never answer.

While he was at home, which was now only for brief intervals between
trips in answer to the invitations he had accepted, it was noted that he
was unusually quiet. Often he would sit for an hour or more upon the
door-step, looking out past the arbor of honeysuckle, over the acres of
land that had been given him, gazing on to the mountains. But he kept
his own counsel. Some of those who lived in the valley, who saw him
sitting, thinking, wondered if there had come a longing into Alvin's
heart to be out in the world again.

But his problem was far from that. He had asked himself two questions:
"What was the great need of the people who live far back in the
mountains?" "What--since the world had been so generous to him, and
lifted from his shoulders the t