There was a strong feeling of kindness and admiration between him and Silas Wright, the celebrated Democratic Senator from New York. The day was once fixed for an important debate between Silas Wright and Daniel Webster. Early in the morning a man who had seen Wright drinking deeply and somewhat overcharged went to Webster and said, “You will have an easy task to-day in overthrowing your adversary; he already reels.” Indignant at the meanness of the remark, the great man frowned darkly and answered in his sternest tones, “Sir, no man has an easy victory over Silas Wright, drunk or sober,” and stalked away. Forrest used to tell this anecdote with characteristic relish of the rebuke pride gave impertinence. He could well appreciate traits of character and modes of conduct which he did not profess to practise but openly repudiated for himself. For instance, though he preferred truth to charity when they were opposed, he often quoted with the warmest admiration the sentiment uttered by some one on the death of Robert Burns: “Let his faults be like swans’ feet, hid beneath the stream.” And he also once said, “The finest eulogy I ever heard spoken of General Grant was, as uttered by an old acquaintance of his, ‘He never forgot a friend nor remembered an enemy.’ Ah, is not that beautiful? If it be justly said, as I am sorry to say I very much doubt, it sets a grace around his head which he himself could never set there.” It is certainly a very curious—though not at all an extraordinary—illustration of human nature to set against the above utterance of Forrest the following quotation from a letter of his dated Syracuse, October 5, 1868: “I saw by the telegraphic news in the paper this morning that George W. Jamieson was killed last night by a railroad train at Yonkers. God is great; and justice, though slow, is sure. Another scoundrel has gone to hell—I trust forever!” Of the very large number of friends Forrest had, his intimacy continued to the end of life with but comparatively few. Fatal barriers and chill spaces of separation came between him and a great many of them, caused sometimes by mere lapse of time and pressure of occupation or removal of residence and change of personal tastes, sometimes by alienating disagreements and collisions of temper. These estrangements were so numerous that he acquired the reputation of being a quarrelsome man and hard to get along with, which was not altogether the fact.