In view of the concentrated Americanism of Forrest, it may seem singular that he was himself a child of foreign parentage, his father being Scotch, his mother German. But this fact, which at first appears strange, is really typical. Nothing could be more characteristic of our nationality, which is a composite of European nationalities transferred to these shores, and here mixed, modified, and developed under new conditions. The only original Americans are the barbaric tribes of Indians, fast perishing away, and never suggested to the thought of the civilized world by the word. The great settlements from which the American people have sprung were English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. To these four ethnic rivers were added a dark flood of slaves from Africa, and vast streams of emigration from Ireland and Germany, impregnated with lesser currents from Italy, Sweden, Portugal, Russia, and other countries, adding now portentous signal-waves from China and Japan. The history of European emigration to America is, in one aspect, a tragedy; in another aspect, a romance. When we think of the hardships suffered, the ties sundered, the farewells spoken, the aching memories left behind, it is a colossal tragedy. When we think of the attractive conditions inviting ahead, the busy plans, the joyous hopes, the prophetic schemes and dreams of freedom, plenty, education, reunion with following friends and relatives, that have gilded the landscape awaiting them beyond the billows, it is a chronic romance. The collective experience in the exodus of the millions on millions of men, women, and children, who, under the goad of trials at home and the lure of blessings abroad, have forsaken Europe for America,--the laceration of affections torn from their familiar objects, the tears and wails of the separation, the dismal discomforts of the voyage, the perishing of thousands on the way, either drawn down the sepulchral mid-ocean or dashed on the rocks in sight of their haven, the long-drawn heart-break of exile, the tedious task of beginning life anew in a strange land,--and then the auspicious opening of the change, the rapid winning of an independence, the quick development of a home-feeling, the assuagement of old sorrows, the conquest of fresh joys and a fast-brightening prosperity broad enough to welcome all the sharers still pouring in endless streams across the sea,--the perception of all this makes the narrative of American immigration at once one of the most pathetic and one of the most inspiring episodes in the history of humanity. This tale--as a complete account of the emigrant ships, the emigrant trains, the emigrant wagons, the clearings and villages and cities of the receding West, would reveal it--stand unique and solitary in the crowd of its peculiarities among all the records of popular removals and colonial settlements since the dispersion of the Aryan race, mysterious mother of the Indo-European nations, from its primeval