A procession of 34 buggies and carriages carried mourners to a hilltop cemetery in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, today as the Amish community buried the first of five girls killed by a gunman inside their tiny one-room schoolhouse.

Amish families gathered today to bury four of the five girls gunned down inside their tiny rural schoolhouse.

PENNSYLVANIA Governor Ed Rendell yesterday offered Amish elders state police protection from an extremist church group that plans to demonstrate at the funerals of five girls fatally shot in an attack on their one-room schoolhouse.

Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, is barely a town – a country crossing is more like it.

A TRUCK driver walked into an Amish school yesterday and sent the boys outside before holding the girls hostage and shooting them.

IT’S barely a town — a country crossing is more like it. Not much to it, really, except for a Thursday-night auction hall, a spring-fed swimming pool and a few homes framed by cornfields.

THE Amish set themselves apart from nearly all modern things — electricity, cars, movies, television and computer games. Most of all, they abhor violence.