In a minute Bess began playing. Mama and Papa quit whispering to each other, and everybody else got quiet, too. The organ's pedals and bellows sounded louder than ever, but Bess kept pumping her feet up and down, faster and faster. She pulled out more and more stops till the music drowned out the organ's whining and wheezing. "That pump organ's gotta be fixed, Jodie!" Mama whispered. "Yeah, I know." Aunt Vic stepped out from between the center curtains. Bess stopped playing. "Let us all rise and repeat together the Lord's Prayer. And please remain standing for the hymn—selection one-eighteen.'' We all stood up and said the Our-Father-Which-Art-In-Heaven prayer, and then everybody except me began singing a slow, sweet-sounding song I'd never heard before about the Holy Night. As soon as we sat down, Bess left the organ and went behind the curtain. I didn't know what would be next. "Papa, will we get the presents now?" "Not yet," he whispered. "I think the schoolteacher's going to speak to us." Mister Shepherd went over to the pulpit stand. First, he said good evening to us all, and then he began making a speech. He spoke about as loud as Brother Milligan, but I couldn't understand much of what he was saying. I could always understand Brother Milligan, for he said the same things every time—all about dying and going to Hell and somebody putting goats on one side and sheep on the other for Judgment Day. I knew all the part about hellfire and brimstone burning and about weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. But Mister Shepherd didn't even mention the fire and red-hot brimstones that Brother Milligan said were forever waiting for the damned. Mister Shepherd seemed to want everybody in the church to think about Christmas Eve instead of damnation. I was glad, because Hell is too far away to think about. "This is a night," the schoolteacher was saying, "for the old, young, and all of us in between! How wonderful it is that you've come and brought your children and grandchildren to see the beautiful tree, to get their gifts, and to hear the story told once more. "It's important that we keep our festive customs and traditions. They smooth the roughness of life. But it's even more important that we hold fast to our sacred beliefs and pass them down. They ease life's pain, give it purpose. "It's a genuine pleasure being the teacher for your children this year. Every school day, from eight o'clock in the morning till four in the evening, my thirty-seven pupils and I are in our own separate world over across the branch at the schoolhouse. They're as fine a bunch as I've ever had, and I've been teaching now for seventeen years. "Yet you can see for yourselves that if I teach these bright pupils only what is printed in the books, and if you provide only something for their dinner buckets, clothes to go on their backs, and a shelter for them at night, we all fail.