| War-chief | notches | 446 | ||
| Jim | oral | 432 | doubtful | 60 |
| Doctor | oral | 754 | doubtful | 0 |
| Average | 544. |
What route they took I never was able to learn, but such were their accounts as they brought them in; and as it was ascertained that the Doctor had been adding to his account all the shops where he saw bottles in the windows, it was decided to be a reasonable calculation that he had brought into the account erroneously:
| Apothecaries and confectioners—say | 300 |
| Leaving the average of all together (which was no doubt very near the thing) Chickabobbooags | 450 |
So ended (after the half-hour’s jokes they had about it) this novel enterprise, which had been carried out with great pains and much fatigue, and in which, it was suggested by them, and admitted by me, they had well earned a jug of chickabobboo.
The settlement of this important affair was not calculated by any means to lessen the Doctor’s curiosity in another respect, and which has been alluded to before—his desire to visit some of those places, to see the manner in which the chickabobboo was made. I put him at rest on that subject, however, by telling him that there was none of it made at those shops where it was sold, but that I had procured an order to admit the whole party to one of the greatest breweries in the city, where the chickabobboo was made, and that we were all to go the next day and see the manner in which it was done. This information seemed to give great pleasure to all, and to finish for the present the subject of chickabobboo.
The night of this memorable day I had announced as the last night of the Indians at the Egyptian Hall, arrangements having been effected for their exhibitions to be made a few days in Vauxhall Gardens before leaving London for some of the provincial towns. This announcement, of course, brought a dense crowd into the Hall, and in it, as usual, the “jolly fat dame,” and many of my old friends, to take their last gaze at the Indians.
The amusements were proceeding this evening, as on former occasions, when a sudden excitement was raised in the following manner. In the midst of one of their noisy dances, the War-chief threw himself, with a violent jump and a yell of the shrill war-whoop, to the corner of the platform, where he landed on his feet in a half-crouching position, with his eyes, and one of his forefingers, fixed upon something that attracted his whole attention in a distant part of the crowd. The dance stopped—the eyes of all the Indians, and of course those of most of the crowd, were attracted to the same point; the eyes of the old War-chief were standing open, and in a full blaze upon the object before him, which nobody could well imagine, from his expression, to be anything less exciting than a huge panther, or a grizly bear, in the act of springing upon him. After staring awhile, and then shifting his weight upon the other leg, and taking a moment to wink, for the relief of his eyes, he resumed the intensity of his gaze upon the object before him in the crowd, and was indulging during a minute or two in a dead silence, for the events of twenty or thirty years to run through his mind, when he slowly straightened up to a more confident position, with his eyes relaxed, but still fixed upon their object, when, in an emphatic and ejaculatory tone, he pronounced the bewildering word of Bobasheela! and repeated it, Bobasheela? “Yes, I’m Bobasheela, my good old fellow! I knew your voice as soon as you spoke (though you don’t understand English yet).” Chee-au-mung-ta-wangish-kee, Bobasheela. “My friends, will you allow me to move along towards that good old fellow? he knows me;” at which the old chief (not of a hundred, but) of many battles, gave a yell, and a leap from the platform, and took his faithful friend Bobasheela in his arms, and after a lapse of thirty years, had the pleasure of warming his cheek against that of one of his oldest and dearest friends—one whose heart, we have since found, had been tried and trusted, and as often requited, in the midst of the dense and distant wildernesses of the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri. Whilst this extraordinary interview was proceeding, all ideas of the dance were for the time lost sight of, and whilst these veterans were rapidly and mutually reciting the evidences of their bygone days of attachment, there came a simultaneous demand from all parts of the room, for an interpretation of their conversation, which I gave as far as I could understand it, and as far as it had then progressed, thus:—The old Sachem, in leading off his favourite war-dance, suddenly fixed his eye upon a face in the crowd, which he instantly recognized, and gazing upon it a moment, decided that it was the well-known face of an old friend, with whom he had spent many happy days of his early life on the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in America. The old chief, by appealing to this gentleman’s familiar Indian cognomen of Bobasheela, brought out an instant proof of the correctness of his recognition; and as he held him by both hands, to make proof doubly strong, he made much merriment amongst the party of Indians, by asking him if he ever “floated down any part of the great Mississippi river in the night, astride of two huge logs of wood, with his legs hanging in the water?” To which Bobasheela instantly replied in the affirmative. After which, and several medicine phrases, and masonic grips and signs had passed between them, the dance was resumed, and the rest of the story, as well as other anecdotes of the lives of these extraordinary personages postponed to the proper time and place, when and where the reader will be sure to hear them.
