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Show 146 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF cleared for the examining committee, and the old women, breathless with excitement, their eyes wild and protruding, and their nostrils dilated, arrived in squads, until the lodge was filled to overflowing. I believe never was mortal gazed at with such intense and sustained interest as I was on that occasion. Arms and legs were critically scrutinized. My face next passed the ordeal; then my neck, back, breast, and all parts of my body, even down to my feet, which did notescape the examination of these anxious matrons, in their endeavors to discover some mark or peculiarity whereby to recognize their brave son. At length one old woman, after having scanned my visage with the utmost intentness, came forward and said, "If this is my son, he has a mole over one of his eyes." My eyelids were immediately pulled down to the utInost stretch of their elasticity, when, sure enough, she discovered a mole just over my left eye! " Then, and oh then!" such shouts of joy as were uttered by that honest-hearted woman were seldom before heard, while all in the crowd took part in her reJOICing. It was uncultivated joy, but not the less heartfelt and intense. It was a joy which a mother can only experience when she recovers a son whom she had supposed dead in his earliest days. She has 1nourned him silently through weary nights and busy days for the long space of twenty years; suddenly he presents himself before her in robust manhood, and graced with the highest name an Indian can appreciate. It is but nature, either in the savage' breast or civilized, that hails such a return with overwhelming joy, and ±~els the mother's undying affection. awakened beyond a control. . .. . • • .. JAMES P. BECKWOURTH. 147 All the other claimants resigning their pretensions, I was fairly carried along by the excited crowd to the lodge of the "Big Bowl," who was my father. The news of my having proved to be the son of Mrs. Big Bowl :flew through the village with the speed of lightning, and, on my arrival at the paternal lodge, I found it filled with all degrees of my newly-discovered relatives, who welcomed me nearly to death. They seized me in their arms and hugged me, and my face positively burned with the enraptured kisses of my numerous fair sisters, with a long host of cousins, aunts, and other more remote kindred. All these welcoming ladies as firmly believed in my identity with the lost one as they believed in the existence of the Great Spirit. My father knew me to be his son; told all the Crows that the dead was alive again, and the lost one was found. He knew it was fact ; Greenwood had said so, and the words of Greenwood were true; his tongue was not crooked-he woU;ld not lie. He also had told him that his son was a great brave · among the white men; that his arm was strong; that the Black Feet quailed before his rifle ·and battle-axe; that his lodge was full of their scalps which his knife had taken; that they ~ust rally around me to support and protect me ; and that his long-lost son would be a strong breastwork to their nation, and he would teach them how to defeat their enemies. They all promised that they would do as his words had indicated. My unmarried sisters were four in number, very pretty, intelligent young women. They, as soon as the departure of the crowd would admit, took off my old leggins, and moccasins, and other garments, and supplied |