When Forrest had accepted the proposal from Caldwell, the thought of the long, long journey and the time that must elapse before he should see his mother again gave him a homesick feeling. He shrank from his engagement. Learning that his acquaintance Sol Smith was then in Lexington collecting a troupe to play in Cincinnati, he called on him and urgently begged to be employed. He said he had rather serve under him for ten dollars a week than under a stranger for eighteen. He was steadily refused. He went over to a circus which then chanced to be there, and hired himself out for a year. Smith says he heard of this with great mortification, and immediately called at the circus. There, he adds, sure enough, was Ned in all his glory, surrounded by riders, tumblers, and grooms. He was slightly abashed at first, but, putting a good face on the affair, said, as he had been refused an engagement at ten dollars a week by his old friend, he had agreed with these boys for twelve. To convince Smith of his ability to sustain his new line of business, he turned a couple of flip-flaps on the spot. Smith took Edwin to his lodgings, and by dint of argument and persuasion succeeding in getting him to abandon the profession of clown and fulfil his promise to Caldwell. He accordingly went to Louisville and took passage on a steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. On the trip he made the acquaintance of Winfield Scott and of John Howard Payne. The celebrated general and the gifted author of Sweet Home seem both to have been strongly attracted to the young actor. They held many long conversations with him, and brought out, from their ample stores of experience in the field and on the boards, anecdotes, principles, criticism, and advice, which were not only highly entertaining to him at the time but lastingly instructive and useful. He always accounted his meeting with these two men as a particular piece of good fortune. It betokens that he was at that period of his life an ingenuous and docile spirit, however impulsive and wild still attracting the sympathy and appropriating from the experience of his elders. CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS.--CRITICAL PERIOD OF EXPERIENCE. FORREST made his first appearance in New Orleans, at the American Theatre, as Jaffier in Venice Preserved, February 4th, 1824, Caldwell sustaining the part of Pierre. His individuality and his acting immediately made a strong impression on the general audience, and drew towards him the fervent personal interest of those particular individuals, both men and women, whose qualities of character caused them to feel a vivid curiosity and sympathy for highly-marked and expressive specimens of human nature. Accordingly, he very soon had many intimate friends among both sexes,--friends whose pronounced types of being and impassioned styles of life wrought assimilatingly upon him in that frank, lusty, and plastic period of his experience.