In 1851 Forrest moved from New York to Philadelphia, and took his three sisters to live with him. But he paid frequent visits to his romantic castle on the Hudson. During one of these visits an incident occurred which presents him to the imagination in real life in a light as picturesque and sensational as many of those scenes of fiction on the stage in which he had so often thrilled the multitude who beheld him. The steamboat “Henry Clay,” plying on the Hudson between New York and Albany, when opposite Fonthill was suddenly wrapt in flames by an explosion of its boiler, and sunk with a crowd of shrieking passengers. The New York “Mirror” of the next day said, “We are informed that while the unfortunate wretches were struggling, Edwin Forrest, who was then at his castle, seeing their condition, rushed down to the river, jumped in, and succeeded in rescuing many from a watery grave, as well as in recovering the bodies of several who were drowned.” In 1856 Forrest sold Fonthill to the Catholic Sisterhood of Mount Saint Vincent, for one hundred thousand dollars. For the devout and beneficent lives of the members of this order he had a profound reverence; and immediately on completing the sale he made to the Mother Superior a present of the sum of five thousand dollars. And so ended all the dreams of domestic peace and bliss his fancy had woven on that enchanted spot, still to be associated with memories of his career and echoes of his name as long as its gray towers shall peer above the trees and be descried from afar by the sailers on the lordly river below. In 1857 Forrest received an unparalleled compliment from the State of California. The Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary, Treasurer, and Comptroller of the State, twenty-seven members of the Senate, with the Secretary and Sergeant-at-Arms, the Speaker and forty-eight members of the House of Representatives, sent him a letter of invitation to make a professional visit to the Golden Coast. It read as follows: “STATE CAPITOL, SACRAMENTO, April 20th, 1857. “RESPECTED SIR,—The undersigned, State officers and members of the Senate and Assembly, a small portion of your many admirers on the coast of the Pacific, avail themselves of this, the only mode under their control, of signifying to you the very high estimation, as a gentleman and an actor, in which you are generally and universally held by all who have a taste for the legitimate drama. Genuine taste and rigid criticism have united with the verdict of impartial history to pronounce you the head and leader of the noble profession to which you have consecrated abilities that would in any sphere of life render you eminent. We believe that so long as Shakspeare is remembered, and his words revered, your name, too, will be remembered with pride by all who glory in the triumphs of our Saxon literature.