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: [Illustration Hamilton August 6th 1823 Due Wm Cooper or order one dollar & fifty cents for Value Recd August 6th 1823---- Edwin Forrest]