It was not until 1857 that those phenomenal powers latent in the boy were suddenly developed, which stamped him the anomaly he is to-day.

One night, sometime in the summer of that year, Mr. Oliver’s family were wakened by the sound of music in the drawing-room:  not only the simple airs, but the most difficult exercises usually played by his daughters, were repeated again and again, the touch of the musician being timid, but singularly true and delicate.  Going down, they found Tom, who had been left asleep in the hall, seated at the piano in an ecstasy of delight, breaking out at the end of each successful fugue into shouts of laughter, kicking his heels and clapping his hands.  This was the first time he had touched the piano.

Naturally, Tom became a nine-days’ wonder on the plantation.  He was brought in as an after-dinner’s amusement; visitors asked for him as the show of the place.  There was hardly a conception, however, in the minds of those who heard him, of how deep the cause for wonder lay.  The planters’ wives and daughters of the neighborhood were not people who would be apt to comprehend music as a science, or to use it as a language; they only saw in the little negro, therefore, a remarkable facility for repeating the airs they drummed on their pianos,—­in a different manner from theirs, it is true,—­which bewildered them.  They noticed, too, that, however the child’s fingers fell on the keys, cadences followed, broken, wandering, yet of startling beauty and pathos.  The house-servants, looking in through the open doors at the little black figure perched up before the instrument, while unknown, wild harmony drifted through the evening air, had a better conception of him.  He was possessed; some ghost spoke through him:  which is a fair enough definition of genius for a Georgian slave to offer.

Mr. Oliver, as we said, was indulgent.  Tom was allowed to have constant access to the piano; in truth, he could not live without it; when deprived of music now, actual physical debility followed:  the gnawing Something had found its food at last.  No attempt was made, however, to give him any scientific musical teaching; nor—­I wish it distinctly borne in mind—­has he ever at any time received such instruction.

The planter began to wonder what kind of a creature this was which he had bought, flesh and soul.  In what part of the unsightly baby-carcass had been stowed away these old airs, forgotten by every one else, and some of them never heard by the child but once, but which he now reproduced, every note intact, and with whatever quirk or quiddity of style belonged to the person who originally had sung or played them?  Stranger still the harmonies which he had never heard, had learned from no man.  The sluggish breath of the old house, being enchanted, grew into quaint and delicate whims of music, never the same, changing every day.  Never glad:  uncertain, sad minors always, vexing the content of the hearer,—­one inarticulate, unanswered question of pain in all, making them one.  Even the vulgarest listener was troubled, hardly knowing why,—­how sorry Tom’s music was!