If it was so with the orderlies, you can imagine how it was with the poor fellows for whom she was working. Every smile from her was a gift; every word was a precious treasure to be stored away and kept through life. They would do anything she asked, for they knew she would do anything in her power for them. When any specially painful operation was to be performed (there was not always chloroform enough, alas! and in any case it was not given so freely in those days as it is now), the Lady-in-Chief would come quietly into the operating room and take her stand beside the patient; and looking up into that calm, steadfast face, and meeting the tender gaze of those pitying eyes that never flinched from any sight of pain or horror, he would take courage and nerve himself to bear the pain, since she was there to help him bear it. "We call her the Angel of the Crimea," one soldier wrote home. "Could bad men be bad in the presence of an angel? Impossible!" Another wrote: "Before she came there was such cussin' and swearin' as you never heard; but after she came it was as holy as a church." And still another--perhaps our Highland lad of the night vigil, perhaps another--wrote to his people: "She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on our pillows again content." Miss Nightingale never wearied of bearing testimony to the many virtues of the British soldier. She loved to tell stories like the following: "I remember a sergeant who, on picket--the rest of the picket killed, and himself battered about the head--stumbled back to camp (before Sebastopol), and on his way, picked up a wounded man and brought him on his shoulders to the lines, where he fell down insensible. When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade: 'Is he alive?' "'Comrade indeed! yes, he's alive--it's the General!' At that moment the General, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside. 'Oh! General, it was you, was it, I brought in? I'm so glad; I didn't know your honor. But if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the same!'"