An obvious lameness, a slight hobble in his gait, was the permanent consequence of this attack. It was sometimes better, sometimes worse; but not all his earnest and patient attempts to cure it ever availed to find a remedy. It was a mortifying blow, from which he never fully recovered, though he grew used to it. His strength of build and movement had been so complete, such a glory to him, he had so exulted in it as it drew admiring attention, that to be thus maimed and halted in one of its most conspicuous centres was indeed a bitter trial to him. Still he kept up good heart, and fondly hoped yet to outgrow it and be all himself again. He was just as faithful as ever to his exercises, his diet, his bathing, his rest and sleep; and he retained, in spite of this shocking blow, an astonishing quantity of vital and muscular energy. Still a large and dark blot had been made on his personal splendor, and all those rôles which required grace and speed of bodily movement sank from their previous height. Notwithstanding his strenuous endeavors to neutralize the effects of this paralysis, its stealthy encroachments spread by imperceptible degrees until his whole right side—shoulder and chest and leg—shrank to smaller dimensions than the left, and at last he was obliged when fencing to have the sword fastened to his hand. And yet he continued to act to the end; acting still with a remarkable physical power and with a mental vividness not one particle lowered from that of his palmiest day. But, after the year 1865, for any of his old friends who remembered the electrifying spontaneity of his terrible demonstrations of strength in former days, to see him in such casts as Metamora, Damon, Spartacus, and Cade, was painful. In the month of January, 1866, Forrest had a most gratifying triumph in Chicago. The receipts were unprecedentedly large, averaging for the five nights of his engagement nearly twenty-five hundred dollars a night. He wrote to his friend Oakes: “Eighteen years since, I acted here in a small theatre of which the present mayor of Chicago, J. B. Rice, Esq., was manager. The population, then about six thousand, is now one hundred and eighty thousand, with a theatre that would grace Naples, Florence, or Paris. The applause I have received here has been as enthusiastic as I have ever known, and the money-return greater. It beats the history of the stage in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. Give me joy, my dear and steadfast friend, that the veteran does _not_ lag superfluous on the stage.”