One Sunday evening there came up a dreadful thunder-storm. As the thunders crashed and rattled, the frightened women, with Mrs. Bryson at their head, rushed into Edwin's room. He went to the window, raised it, took his sword and waved it out. When the electric flashes broke, it looked as if the lightnings were dancing on the point of his sword. The women fled out of his room with even greater terror than they had come into it, and he laughed heartily to see them scamper.
Gallagher was present at an interview of Mrs. Bryson and her daughter with Mr. Forrest in 1869, the first time they had met for forty-six years. Although the daughter, Mrs. Kemp, was but a little girl when they parted, he recognized her at the first glance. They spent a long time in unrestrained enjoyment, talking over the events of the old times as if they were things that had occurred but a few days previously. Mrs. Bryson exclaimed, "Oh, Edwin Forrest, I can scarcely realize it when I look at you and think what a beautiful boy you were when we last met, and now see you such a great, heavy man, and getting into age, too!"
At the end of the winter, Collins and Jones found their enterprise a pecuniary failure. They incontinently shut up the theatre and turned the whole company out to shift for themselves as best they could. These poor children of Thespis were in a pitiful plight. Without money, without employment or prospects, what could they do? About a dozen of them, including Forrest, Mrs. Riddle, and her two daughters, determined to extemporize a vagrant company, travel into the country, and try their fortune from town to town. Their action was as prompt as their pluck was good and their means small. With a couple of rickety wagons and two dreadfully thin old horses, they started off for Hamilton, most of them on foot. It is interesting to contemplate the little band of strolling players as they thus set out on their adventures. On their journey they scrutinized many a passing itinerant unlike themselves, laughed and sang in jovial liberty, while the birds sang around them by day and the stars twinkled over their heads by night. If there were hardships in it, tough and scanty fare, rude conditions, weary trudges, harsh treatment, wretched patronage, there were also in it rich experiences of life at first hand, a rough relish, a free existence in the open air, and all the traditional associations linking them to the strollers of other times and lands, wandering minstrels, beggars, apprentices, gypsies, and those travelling groups of actors who used to perform in the yards of inns or the halls of baronial castles, and a specimen of whom found a so much better than lenten entertainment from the hands of Hamlet at Elsinore.
After performing at Hamilton for eight or ten nights, in the second story of a venerable barn, with more applause than profit, they went to Lebanon. An interesting reminiscence of this time is given by the following fac-simile of a note afterwards redeemed by its signer, and found carefully preserved among his papers at his death:
Hamilton August 6th 1823
Due Wm. Cooper or order one
dollar & fifty cents for Value Recd
August 6th 1823—
Edwin Forrest
They met little encouragement at Lebanon, and proceeded to Dayton, where they had still poorer success. In fact, their funds and their hopes gave out together, and they agreed to disperse. Forrest had not one cent in his pocket. He started on foot for Cincinnati, a distance of about forty miles. Journeying along on the bank of the Big Miami River, he spied a canoe on the other shore. How much easier it would be to float than to walk! He stripped, plunged, and swam. As soon as he was near enough to see that the boat was chained and locked, the owner of it appeared and pointed a gun at him. He made backward strokes to his clothes, and resumed his plod. It was evening when he reached Cincinnati, pretty well fagged out. Some of his acquaintances met him in the street, said an amateur club were that night to play the farce of Miss in her Teens across the river at Newport, that one of the fellows was drunk, and asked him if he would fill the vacancy. He consented to do it for five dollars. They agreed to give that price, and he went and did it. The excessive fatigue probably made it the hardest-earned, as it was the sorest-needed, five dollars he ever received. It nearly exhausted the proceeds of the performance.
In a short time the scattered strollers rejoined their forces at Louisville to try one more experiment. They succeeded moderately well. But Archibald Woodruff, keeper of the Globe Inn in Cincinnati, had fitted up a hasty and cheap structure adjoining his tavern, and christened it the Globe Theatre. He invited the Louisville company to come and open it. They did so on the evening of June 2d, 1823, with Douglas, Forrest as Norval. June 4th they gave the play of The Iron Chest, Forrest as Sir Edward Mortimer, Mrs. Riddle as Lady Helen. On subsequent nights he sustained among other characters those of George Barnwell, Octavian in The Mountaineers, Jaffier in Venice Preserved, and Richard the Third, besides several parts in low comedy.
But perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manners. This he did ten years before T. D. Rice, usually denominated the originator of the Ethiopian drama, made his début at the Bowery in the character of Jim Crow. Rice deserves his fame, for, though preceded first by Forrest, and then in a more systematic fashion by George W. Dixon, he was the man who really popularized the burnt-cork and burlesque minstrelsy and made it the institution it became.