hope:  they have no clan, no family-names among them, therefore.  This idiot-boy, chosen by God to be anointed with the holy chrism, is only “Tom,”—­“Blind Tom,” they call him in all the Southern States, with a kind cadence always, being proud and fond of him; and yet—­nothing but Tom?  That is pitiful.  Just a mushroom-growth,—­unkinned, unexpected, not hoped for, for generations, owning no name to purify and honor and give away when he is dead.  His mother, at work to-day in the Oliver plantations, can never comprehend why her boy is famous; this gift of God to him means nothing to her.  Nothing to him, either, which is saddest of all; he is unconscious, wears his crown as an idiot might.  Whose fault is that?  Deeper than slavery the evil lies.

Mr. Oliver did his duty well to the boy, being an observant and thoroughly kind master.  The plantation was large, heartsome, faced the sun, swarmed with little black urchins, with plenty to eat, and nothing to do.

All that Tom required, as he fattened out of baby- into boyhood, was room in which to be warm, on the grass-patch, or by the kitchen-fires, to be stupid, flabby, sleepy,—­kicked and petted alternately by the other hands.  He had a habit of crawling up on the porches and verandas of the mansion and squatting there in the sun, waiting for a kind word or touch from those who went in and out.  He seldom failed to receive it.  Southerners know nothing of the physical shiver of aversion with which even the Abolitionists of the North touch the negro:  so Tom, through his very helplessness, came to be a sort of pet in the family, a playmate, occasionally, of Mr. Oliver’s own infant children.  The boy, creeping about day after day in the hot light, was as repugnant an object as the lizards in the neighboring swamp, and promised to be of as little use to his master.  He was of the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made,—­coal-black, with protruding heels, the ape-jaw, blubber-lips constantly open, the sightless eyes closed, and the head thrown far back on the shoulders, lying on the back, in fact, a habit which he still retains, and which adds to the imbecile character of the face.  Until he was seven years of age, Tom was regarded on the plantation as an idiot, not unjustly; for at the present time his judgment and reason rank but as those of a child four years old.  He showed a dog-like affection for some members of the household,—­a son of Mr. Oliver’s especially,—­and a keen, nervous sensitiveness to the slightest blame or praise from them,—­possessed, too, a low animal irritability of temper, giving way to inarticulate yelps of passion when provoked.  That is all, so far; we find no other outgrowth of intellect or soul from the boy:  just the same record as that of thousands of imbecile negro-children.  Generations of heathendom and slavery have dredged the inherited brains and temperaments of such children tolerably clean of all traces of power or purity,—­palsied the brain, brutalized the nature.  Tom apparently fared no better than his fellows.