US: In the fields around Nickel Mines, a few miles from Paradise, Pennsylvania, Amish men in broad-brimmed straw hats were working as usual yesterday, driving ploughs drawn by teams of four horses.
Women wearing white bonnets and dark, long dresses with billowing aprons were carrying baskets to outdoor clothes lines, turning their heads away as strangers passed.
The Amish work hard to keep the outside world away, shunning electricity, telephones and motorised transport - they drive covered horse-drawn buggies - and communicating in a dialect of German called Pennsylvania Dutch.
The world intruded brutally into the gentle life of the Amish on Monday morning, however, when Charles Carl Roberts (32), a milk delivery man, walked into a one-room schoolhouse and took 10 schoolgirls hostage, leaving five dead and five in hospital and killing himself.
The dead girls included two sisters, Lina and Mary Liz Miller, aged seven and eight, along with seven-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersole, Anna Mae Stoltzfus (12) and Marian Fisher (13).
Within hours of the shootings, the grieving parents let it be known that they forgave Roberts and local police officer John Kurtz predicted that the Amish community would overcome the tragedy.
"You'd be amazed by the resilience and strength of this community," Mr Kurtz said. "They're dealing with it, they're dealing with it very well. They're probably dealing with it better than most communities could."
Most of the Old Order Amish around Paradise run dairy farms or home shops where they make sheds and garden furniture.
The West Nickel Mine school is one of more than 150 one-room Amish schools in this part of Pennsylvania, where 27 pupils studied reading, writing, mathematics, music and German, the language of Amish services, which are held in private homes.
The dead girls' funerals will be held at home too and they will be buried in simple graves that will be left unmarked or only identified by a small tombstone laid flat on the ground.
Anabaptists, who believe in adult baptism, non-violence and the separation of church and state, the Amish first settled in Pennsylvania in the 1730s after fleeing persecution in Europe.
Women cover their heads, married men wear beards and all avoid cameras, believing that photographs violate the Bible's teaching against making graven images.
Kristine Heilman, a local Presbyterian minister, said that relations between the Amish and those they call "English" are detached but cordial.
"It's a separate community in one way," the Rev Heilman said. "They speak a different language, but we're neighbours. We live right beside each other. If we have a funeral here, the Amish will come."
As Roberts was preparing to kill in the schoolhouse on Monday morning, Kristine Heilman was praying with his wife Marie at a weekly prayer group for mothers.
"She's a wonderful, godly woman who cared for her husband and their children," the Rev Heilman said. "We had a wonderful prayer meeting, the normal meeting of moms we have every week."
Ms Roberts said in a statement that her husband had always been "loving, supportive and thoughtful" and that his actions on Monday came without warning.
"He was an exceptional father. He took the kids to soccer practice and games, played ball in the back yard and took our seven-year-old daughter shopping. He never said no when I asked him to change a diaper.
"Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered and we grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today. Above all, please pray for the families who lost children and please pray too for our family and children."
Roberts's actions may have come without warning but police said yesterday that he had clearly been planning the attack for days, buying hardware equipment on September 26th to barricade the school doors.
In a makeshift press centre at a church hall yesterday, Pennsylvania police commissioner Jeffrey Miller gave new details about how Roberts planned the killings and about suicide notes he left at his home and in his truck on Monday.
Roberts, who was armed with three guns, had sexual lubricant with him and flexible handcuffs. He chained the girls together in a line at the blackboard and barricaded the doors after sending the boys and adults away.
In a suicide note to his wife, Roberts said he was angry with God and himself over the death of their daughter Elise, who was born prematurely four years ago and died after only 20 minutes. In a phone call to his wife from the school, Roberts said he had sexually molested minors in his family 20 years ago, when he would have been just 12.
"He states in his suicide note that he had dreams about doing what he did 20 years ago again," the police commissioner said.
Police have been unable to confirm that Roberts had in fact molested any members of his family while Mr Miller said that none of the girls at the Amish school was sexually assaulted.
After three fatal school shootings within a week, president George Bush announced yesterday that his administration would hold a summit to consider how to improve security at schools.
Despite similarities between Monday's killings and an incident in Colorado last week, Mr Miller said he did not believe that Roberts was copying the earlier attack or that he was deliberately targeting the Amish community.
"I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head," the commissioner said.