Of the efficiency of his service there can be no question.[386] He worked his own miracles. He knew it positively himself, and besides, both the lads and the doctors assured him, time and again, that he was saving lives by refusing to give them over to despair. "I can testify," he writes to _The Brooklyn Eagle_, his old paper, "that friendship has literally cured a fever, and the medicine of daily affection a bad wound."[387] In his own words, he distributed himself,[388] as well as the contents of his pockets and haversack, in infinitesimal quantities, certain that but little of his giving would be wasted. And yet he never gave indiscriminately;[389] he knew always what he was doing, and did it with deliberation. The feeling that the lads wanted him had detained him at the first; the superabundance of his life, and the fulness of his health and spirits, carrying with them a conviction of duty when he entered these vestibules of death.[390] Here was something that he, and he only, could adequately accomplish; here was a cry he was bound by the law of his being to answer; and the cry of the hospitals continued to hold him till the war was done. As he left of a night, after going his last round and kissing many a young, pale, bearded face, in fulfilment of his own written injunctions, he would hear the boys calling, "Walt, Walt, Walt! come again, come again!" And it would have required a harder heart than his to refuse them, even had the answer within been less loud and insistent. They kept him busy, too. He provided them with pens, stamps, envelopes and paper, and wrote their letters for them;[391] letters to mothers, wives and sweethearts; and the last news of all, when the sad procession had carried son, husband or lover to his soldier's grave, and had fired over him the last salute. He would enter, armed with newspapers and magazines which he distributed; and often he would read to the men, or recite some suitable verses, never, I think, his own.[392] He played games with them, too; and though he was one of the few men in Washington who never smoked,[393] he was the only one of all the visitors who brought them tobacco; and the ward-surgeons, though at first they protested, could not refuse him; it really seemed as though Walt knew best. On the glorious Fourth, he would provide a feast of ice-cream for some ward;[394] and on other hot days--and there were too many in the capital--would distribute the contents of crates full of oranges,[395] or lemons and sugar for the making of lemonade. It was for such gifts as these, and many others of a similar kind, that he needed money; and through the influence of Emerson, James Redpath and other friends in New York and Boston, he was able to distribute perhaps £1,200 among the soldiers in these infinitesimal quantities.[396] Thus he became the almoner of many in the North.