on a level with the mountainside. To care for
the mountain's slope a front stoop was built. The sides of it are
scantlings and the steps are narrow boards.

The house has been painted by Poverty; but the home is warmed and lit by
a mountain mother's love. The front stoop is a wooden ladder with flat
steps but the entrance to the home is an arbor of honey suckle and
roses.

On summer nights the York boys sat on that stoop and sang, and their
voices floated on the moonbeams out over the valley. The little mother
"pottered" about, with ever a smile on her face for her boys. They were
happy.

It was from this home that Alvin went to war, and it was to it he
returned.

Visitors know, and it is well for others to realize, that Pall Mall and
the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are back among the rising
ranges of the Cumberland Mountains forty-eight miles from the railroad.

Alvin York came from a line of ancestors who were cane-cutters and
Indian fighters. The earliest ancestor of whom he has knowledge was a
"Long Hunter," who with a rifle upon his shoulder strode into the Valley
of the Wolf and homesteaded the river bottom-lands. Here his people
lived far from the traveled paths. Marooned in their mountain
fastnesses, they clung to the customs and the traditions of the past.
Their life was simple, and their sports quaint. They held
shooting-matches on the mountainside, enjoyed "log-rollings" and
"corn-huskings." Strong in their loves and in their hates, they feared
God, but feared no man. The Civil War swept over the valley and left
splotches of blood.

Friends of Sergeant York, knowing that the history of his people was
rich in story, and that the public was waiting, wanting to know more of
the man the German army could not run, nor make surrender--and instead
had to come to him--urged that his story be told.

He had been mustered out of the army and come back to the valley wanting
to pick up again the dropped thread of his former life. He was striving
earnestly and prayerfully to blot from recurrent memory that October
morning scene on "York's Hill" in France.

His friends and neighbors at Pall Mall waited eagerly for his return.
They wanted to hear from his own lips the story of his fight.

No man of the mountains was ever given the home-coming that was his. It
was made the reunion of the people, with the neighbors the component
parts of one great family.

When home again, Alvin wanted no especial def