One day when Forrest was walking with a friend in Brooklyn a beggar accosted them. Tears were in his eyes, and he had a ragged exterior as well as a tottering form and a pale and sunken look. With a plaintive voice he said, “For the love of heaven, gentlemen, give me a trifle for the sake of my starving family. You will not feel it, and it will relieve a half a score of hungry ones. Will you not aid me?” Forrest looked at the man for a moment as if reading his very soul, and then said, while placing a golden eagle in his hand, “Yes, my friend, you are either a true subject for charity or else the best actor I ever saw.” Forrest always carried his professional humor and docility with him. He gave a ludicrous description of an amateur grave-digger who lived in Philadelphia. He was worth fifty thousand dollars, yet whenever a grave was to be made he liked to have a hand in it. His nose was so turned up that his brains might have been seen, had he possessed any. And his voice was a perfect model for the second grave-digger in Hamlet, saying, “The crowner hath set on her, and finds it Christian burial.” A strolling exhibitor of snakes came to Louisville when Forrest was playing there in his youth. Wishing to feel the strongest emotions of fear, that he might utilize the experience in his acting, Forrest asked the man to take care of the head of a boa-constrictor some twelve feet in length and let the hideous reptile crawl about his naked neck. He never forgot the cold, clammy slip of the coils on his flesh and the sickening horror it awakened. CHAPTER XVIII. PRIZES AND PENALTIES OF FAME.