PORGY DU BOSE HEYWARD _Books by the Same Author_ CAROLINA CHANSONS (WITH HERVEY ALLEN) SKYLINES AND HORIZONS PORGY DU BOSE HEYWARD [Illustration] _Decorated by_ THEODORE NADEJEN NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY _Copyright, 1925, By George H. Doran Company_ PORGY --B-- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR DOROTHY HEYWARD _Porgy, Maria, and Bess,_ _Robbins, and Peter, and Crown;_ _Life was a three-stringed harp_ _Brought from the woods to town._ _Marvelous tunes you rang_ _From passion, and death, and birth,_ _You who had laughed and wept_ _On the warm, brown lap of the earth._ _Now in your untried hands_ _An instrument, terrible, new,_ _Is thrust by a master who frowns,_ _Demanding strange songs of you._ _God of the White and Black,_ _Grant us great hearts on the way_ _That we may understand_ _Until you have learned to play._ I [Illustration] PORGY PART I Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed. In this city there persisted the Golden Age of many things, and not the least among them was that of beggary. In those days the profession was one with a tradition. A man begged, presumably, because he was hungry, much as a man of more energetic temperament became a stevedore from the same cause. His plea for help produced the simple reactions of a generous impulse, a movement of the hand, and the gift of a coin, instead of the elaborate and terrifying processes of organized philanthropy. His antecedents and his mental age were his own affair, and, in the majority of cases, he was as happily oblivious of one as of the other.