The story takes place during the summer in June. The day is clear and sunny the flowers are blooming and the grass is nice and green. In was ten o'clock now and the villagers were gathering at the village square, waiting for the village's lottery to start. In some villages the lottery took two days or so but this was a small village so the lottery only took an hour or so.
The children of the village were playing with each other and doing children type of things, Bobby Martin along with the other boys in the square filled their pockets up with rocks. They also made a nice pile of rocks in one corner of the square and guarded it against other boys who would steal from their pile. The girls stood away from the boys and talked to each other and looked over their shoulders at them, while the young children played in the dirt.
Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845. "Unknown Artist, ...
The Hutchinson Family Singers' "Get off the Track!...
Hutchinson Family SingersThe men gathered and talked to one another and made jokes and talked about the weather, farming, and taxes. The women greeted one another and gossiped and then joined their husbands in the village square.
The lottery was about to start and was lead by a man called Mr. Summers, who conducted all of the social events for the village. He directed the Halloween program, and ran the teenage club, and the square dances. Mr. Summers had carried the wooden black box; they had lost the original equipment long ago and used the black box instead. Mr. Summers had tried for years to talk the villagers into getting a new box, but nobody wanted to disrupt the tradition of the black box being a part of the lottery.
The actual ritual had been forgotten over the years and they now used slips of...