However wild and questionable in a moral point of view were some of Forrest's closest friends in New Orleans, and freely as he himself indulged in pleasure, he shed the worst influences exerted on him, was never recklessly abandoned to any vice whatever, but held a strong curb over his passions, and was uniformly faithful and punctual in the extreme to all his professional duties, steadily working in every way he knew to improve and to rise. And he owed in several respects an immense debt to these friends. For, stimulated by the sight of their superb poise, courage, and exuberant fulness of animal life and passion, he took them as models, and labored with unflagging patience by a careful hygiene and gymnastic and critical self-control to fortify his weak places and lift his constitutional vitality and confidence to the highest point. He was temperate in food and drink, scrupulous as to rest and sleep, abundant in bathing, manipulation, and athletics. His development was steady, and he became in a certain personal centrality of balance, an assured and massive authority of bearing, unquestionably one of the most pronounced and imposing men on the continent. Nor, in that remote situation, in those tempted days, did he forget his distant home, with the humble and repulsive hardships pressing on the dear ones within it. He wrote to them affectionately, cheering them up, sending them such small remittances as he could afford, and promising larger ones in the future. With the very first money he received from Caldwell, after paying his landlady, he purchased and forwarded by ship to his mother a barrel of flour, a half-barrel of sugar, and a box of oranges. His youngest sister, in the last year of her life, described the scene in their home when these things arrived. She was out of the house on an errand when they came. Entering the door, there sat her mother weeping for joy, with an open letter in her hand. Caroline stood with her bonnet on, just starting to take a dish of oranges to one of their neighbors, and Henrietta rushed forward, crying, "Oh, Eleanora, here is something from our dear Edwin!"