During the next two or three years his musical education prospered. Great singers and musicians began occasionally to visit America: Jenny Lind, Sontag, Mario, Grisi, Bosio, and Alboni. Thomas played everywhere in concerts and operas, and this gave him constant opportunity to hear these artists under the best of conditions. “The pure and musical quality of their art,” he has said, “was of great value in forming the taste of an impressionable boy at the outset of his career.” The influence of this experience did much to prepare him for his own triumphs in coming years. There were at that time no real orchestras in America. An orchestra meant to Thomas a selected organization of skilled musicians “sufficiently subsidized to enable it to hold the rehearsals necessary for artistic performances, its object and aim to be to attain the highest artistic performance of master-works.” Of the existing orchestras of the time all were of negligible quality, and their leaders mere “time-beaters,” instead of true musicians. But at this time such a leader appeared for a short period in the circle of Thomas’s life. Karl Eckert, the leader of the orchestra accompanying Mademoiselle Sontag, appeared in New York, and Thomas secured a position as one of the first violinists in the orchestra, a position from which he was soon promoted to leader of the second violins. Thomas gave his best effort to his new work. It was a place of responsibility, and the boy was young, but he saw his opportunity, grasped it, and held it. The following year Thomas won promotion to _Konzert-meister_, or leader of the first violins; and here his extreme genius became the more apparent, for he was now the leader of men many of whom were old enough to be his father. This was the definite beginning of his career, for the experience of playing in a well-organized orchestra gave him a thorough schooling, not only in his duties as Konzert-meister but—and this was of particular value to him—in the practical business side of orchestral management. In 1853 his education was further broadened by a year in the orchestra of Jullien, a famous European conductor. This was the first time that he had heard or played in a large and complete orchestra, and the result was that he was now ready to step out from the ranks and begin to develop his ability as an individual and a leader. For about twelve years the New York Philharmonic Society had struggled, against popular indifference, to create a source of real music in the community. In 1854 Thomas was elected a member. He was nineteen years old. For thirty-six years he was destined to hold a more or less close association with it, first as violinist and later as its leader.