hony in its
current,--a capacity to create, in short. Yet such attempts as Tom has
made to dictate music for publication do not sustain any such inference.
They are only a few light marches, gallops, etc., simple and plaintive
enough, but with easily detected traces of remembered harmonies: very
different from the strange, weird improvisations of every day. One would
fancy that the mere attempt to bring this mysterious genius within him
in bodily presence before the outer world woke, too, the idiotic nature
to utter its reproachful, unable cry. Nor is this the only bar by which
poor Tom's soul is put in mind of its foul bestial prison. After any
too prolonged effort, such as those I have alluded to, his whole bodily
frame gives way, and a complete exhaustion of the brain follows,
accompanied with epileptic spasms. The trial at the White House,
mentioned before, was successful, but was followed by days of illness.

Being a slave, Tom never was taken into a Free State; for the same
reason his master refused advantageous offers from European managers.
The highest points North at which his concerts were given were Baltimore
and the upper Virginia towns. I heard him sometime in 1860. He remained
a week or two in the town, playing every night.

The concerts were unique enough. They were given in a great barn of
a room, gaudy with hot, soot-stained frescoes, chandeliers, walls
splotched with gilt. The audience was large, always; such as a
provincial town affords: not the purest bench of musical criticism
before which to bring poor Tom. Beaux and belles, siftings of old
country families, whose grandfathers trapped and traded and married with
the Indians,--the savage thickening of whose blood told itself in high
cheekbones, flashing jewelry, champagne-bibbing, a comprehension of
the tom-tom music of schottisches and polkas; money-made men and their
wives, cooped up by respectability, taking concerts when they were given
in town, taking the White Sulphur or Cape May in summer, taking beef for
dinner, taking the pork-trade in winter,--_toute la vie en programme_;
the _debris_ of a town, the roughs, the boys, school-children,--Tom was
nearly as well worth a quarter as the negro-minstrels; here and there
a pair of reserved, homesick eyes, a peculiar, reticent face, some
whey-skinned ward-teacher's, perhaps, or some German cobbler's, but
hints of a hungry soul, to whom Beethoven and Mendelssohn knew how
to preach an unerring gospel.