Can check the current as it seeks the brain,
Arrest its course, and bring it back again;
Freeze it when circling round the glowing heart,
Or thaw it thence, and bid it, melting, part;
Rouse up revenge for Tell's unmeasured wrongs
Until it echoes from a thousand tongues;
Or melt the soul of friendship quite away
When Damon claims his Pythias' dying day."
From this auspicious beginning he went steadily on gaining power and public favor until his popularity was so conspicuous that one of the managers of the rival establishment came to him with an offer of three times the amount he was then receiving. He replied, "I cannot listen to you, as I am engaged to Gilfert for the season." "You are not bound by a legal paper, and therefore are free," expostulated the wily bargainer. "Sir," was his characteristic answer, "my word is as strong as any written contract." During this first winter, so rapidly did his fame spread that Gilfert actually lent him repeatedly to other theatres at two hundred dollars a night, he still paying him only his forty dollars a week. Certain disinterested persons who learned this fact commented on it to Gilfert himself with much severity. And at the end of the engagement he said to the young man, "I want to engage you for the next season, but I suppose our terms must be somewhat different. What do you expect?" Forrest quietly looked at him, and replied, "You have yourself fixed my value. You have found me to be worth two hundred dollars a night." He was at once engaged at that rate for eighty nights. And it is to be remembered that sixteen thousand dollars then was equivalent to thirty thousand now. He had just passed his twenty-first birthday. Thus in six short months the youthful artist who came to the metropolis poor, scarcely known, little heralded, had acquired an imposing fame, was surrounded by a brilliant host of friends, and entered on his summer vacation prospective master of a sumptuous income.