Under the guidance of this typical man, who was always scrupulously tender and careful with him, Forrest was initiated into all the mysteries, all the heights and depths, of a world of experience kept veiled and secret from most people. It was a world of dreadful fascinations and volcanic outbreaks, extravagant pleasures and indescribable horrors,--a world whose heroes are apt, as the proverb goes, to die with their boots on. Together they visited cock-pits, race-courses, bar-rooms, gambling-saloons, and every other resort of disorderly passion and disreputable living. And the young actor with his professional eyes drank in many a revelation of human nature uncovered at its deepest places and in its wildest moods. It was a fearful exposure, and he did not escape unscathed, though it seems from his after-life that he was more instructed than he was infected. He never forgot the impression made on him in the cock-pit by the rings of staring visages, tier above tier, massed in frenzied eagerness and regularly vibrating with the struggles of the feathered and gaffed champions whose untamable ferocity of valor and pluck seemed to satirize the vulgar pride of human battle. Still deeper was the effect on his memory of the scene when, at a race, he saw a vast crowd, including the governor of the State, the mayor of the city, members of Congress, rich planters, leading lawyers and merchants, boatmen, bullies, and loafers, all armed, yet behaving as politely as in a parlor, restrained by the knowledge that at the slightest insult knives would gleam, pistols crack, blood flow, and no one could foretell where the fray would end. On one occasion, taking a swim with Gazonac in Lake Pontchartrain, Forrest saw a thick-set and commanding sort of man, with flashing black eyes, his breast scarred all over with stabs. "Who is that?" he asked. "It is Lafitte, the pirate," his comrade replied. A week or two afterwards, he saw Lafitte, in the square fronting the cathedral, running like a deer, chased by a man with a knife. Gazonac said, "Oh, on the quarter-deck, with his myrmidons around him, he could play the hero; but he was not a brave man. Some men can fight in crowds but cannot fight singly. This requires courage." He then proceeded to relate some examples of single-handed fights. Two friends of his fought a duel on this wise. They were locked in a room in the dark, naked, each having a knife. In the morning they were found dead in a bloody heap, cut almost into strips. A man who can foresee such a result yet go resolutely into it is no coward, Gazonac said. Two others fought thus. They were to begin with rifles at three hundred paces; if these failed, advance with pistols; and, these failing, close with knives. At the first shot both dropped dead: the bullet of one struck exactly between the eyes, that of the other pierced the pit of the stomach.