The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a  beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes  longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery  takes only two hours. Village children, who have just finished school  for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in  their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed  by the women. Parents call their children over, and families stand  together.  Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things  for the village. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed  by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box  used for the lottery because the original was lost many years ago, even  before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always  suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but  no one wants to fool around with tradition. Mr. Summers did, however,  convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips  of paper.