The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sport of the Gods, by Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Title: The Sport of the Gods

Author: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #17854]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE SPORT OF THE GODS

by

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Author of "Lyrics of Lowly Life," "Poems of Cabin and
Field," "Candle-Lightin' Time," "The Fanatics," etc.

Originally published in 1902

Contents

I. The Hamiltons

II. A Farewell Dinner

III. The Theft

IV. From a Clear Sky

V. The Justice of Men

VI. Outcasts

VII. In New York

VIII. An Evening Out

IX. His Heart's Desire

X. A Visitor from Home

XI. Broken Hopes

XII. "All the World's a Stage"

XIII. The Oakleys

XIV. Frankenstein

XV. "Dear, Damned, Delightful Town"

XVI. Skaggs's Theory

XVII. A Yellow Journal

XVIII. What Berry Found

I

THE HAMILTONS

Fiction has said so much in regret of the old days when there were
plantations and overseers and masters and slaves, that it was good to
come upon such a household as Berry Hamilton's, if for no other reason
than that it afforded a relief from the monotony of tiresome iteration.

The little cottage in which he lived with his wife, Fannie, who was
housekeeper to the Oakleys, and his son and daughter, Joe and Kit, sat
back in the yard some hundred paces from the mansion of his employer. It
was somewhat in the manner of the old cabin in the quarters, with which
usage as well as tradition had made both master and servant familiar.
But, unlike the cabin of the elder day, it was a neatly furnished,
modern house, the home of a typical, good-living negro. For twenty years
Berry Hamilton had been butler for Maurice Oakley. He was one of the
many slaves who upon their accession to freedom had not left the South,
but had wandered from place to place in their own beloved section,
waiting, working, and struggling to rise with its re