as Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote of Sargent's portrait, which heads this chapter--was a strange and moving one, and in range of expression unsurpassed. His eyes were especially wonderful, dark brown, but seeming to turn black in moments of passion, and conveying, with electrical effect, the actor's thought. He was unique. He stood apart. The American stage has never produced another like him. Second only to Edwin Booth in sheer glory of achievement stands Edwin Forrest. He fell far below Booth in grace, in charm, and in poetic insight, but he surpassed him in physical equipment for the great parts of tragedy, particularly in his voice, magnificent, vibrating, with an extraordinary depth and purity of tone. Unlike Booth, Forrest came from no family of actors, nor inherited a name famous in the annals of the stage. He was born in Philadelphia in 1806, his father being a Scotchman, employed in Stephen Girard's bank, and making just enough money to keep his family of six children from actual want. He died when Edwin was thirteen years old, and his widow, by opening a little store, managed to support the children. She was a serious and devout woman and decided that Edwin should enter the ministry. But meantime, he must earn a living, so he was apprenticed to a cooper. How long he stayed with the cooper nobody knows; but it could not have been long, for already he was fired with an ambition to be an actor, and after some experience as an amateur, astonished and grieved his mother by announcing that he was going on the stage. He made his first appearance on the 27th of November, 1820, as Young Norval, in Home's tragedy of "Douglas," and was an immediate success. His youth--remember, he was but fourteen--his handsome face and manly bearing, and, above all, that wonderful and resonant voice, won the audience at once, and his career was begun. But many hardships awaited him. The theatres of New York and Philadelphia had their companies of well-known and well-trained actors. There was no hope for him in either of those cities; but at last he secured an engagement to play juvenile parts at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, and other towns of the middle west, at a salary of eight dollars a week. This, of course, was scarcely enough to keep body and soul together, but all Forrest wanted was a chance, and he did not murmur at the suffering and hardship which followed.