Silas was very glad to be rid of his old friend, and he thought when Marston had gone that he was, after all, not such a great man as he had believed.  But the decline in his estimation of Mr. Marston’s importance did not deter him from going that night with three of his fellow-waiters to sing for that gentleman.  Two of the quartet insisted upon singing fine music, in order to show their capabilities, but Silas had received his cue, and held out for the old songs.  Silas Jackson’s tenor voice rang out in the old plantation melodies with the force and feeling that old memories give.  The concert was a great success, and when Marston pressed a generous-sized bank-note into his hand that night, he whispered, “Well, I’m glad there’s one thing you haven’t lost, and that’s your voice.”

That was the beginning of Silas’s supremacy as manager and first tenor of the Fountain Hotel Quartet, and he flourished in that capacity for two years longer; then came Mr. J. Robinson Frye, looking for talent, and Silas, by reason of his prominence, fell in this way.

Mr. J. Robinson Frye was an educated and enthusiastic young mulatto gentleman, who, having studied music abroad, had made art his mistress.  As well as he was able, he wore the shock of hair which was the sign manual of his profession.  He was a plausible young man of large ideas, and had composed some things of which the critics had spoken well.  But the chief trouble with his work was that his one aim was money.  He did not love the people among whom American custom had placed him, but he had respect for their musical ability.

“Why,” he used to exclaim in the sudden bursts of enthusiasm to which he was subject, “why, these people are the greatest singers on earth.  They’ve got more emotion and more passion than any other people, and they learn easier.  I could take a chorus of forty of them, and with two months’ training make them sing the roof off the Metropolitan Opera house.”

When Mr. Frye was in New York, he might be seen almost any day at the piano of one or the other of the negro clubs, either working at some new inspiration, or playing one of his own compositions, and all black clubdom looked on him as a genius.

His latest scheme was the training of a colored company which should do a year’s general singing throughout the country, and then having acquired poise and a reputation, produce his own opera.

It was for this he wanted Silas, and in spite of the warning and protests of friends, Silas went with him to New York, for he saw his future loom large before him.