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In the higher classes it is one in twenty-three. In the insane Hospital of Massachusetts I have it from authority which I cannot question, the proportion is at least one in three or four. At present there are about twenty cases of the kind alluded to. Chorea Sancti Viti; or St. Vitus's dance.
From the moment she caught sight of Vaudrey standing within the range of her opera-glasses, she was seized with the eager desire to make him an habitué of her salon, the new salon that had just been launched. Madame Marsy was bitten by that tarantula whose bite makes modern society move as if afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance.
We build our churches almost without regard to cost; we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town, and we gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage it, and do everything we can think of to perfect it, and then spoil it all by putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it, giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance, and the rest the blind staggers.
"Yes," explained the mining man, "that is to say, that its poison will cause a sort of St. Vitus's dance." "Good gracious! How unpleasant!" cried Jess. "I'm awfully fond of dancing, but I wouldn't care to come by my fun that way." "Better than being bitten by the kissing bug anyhow," teased Roy mischievously.
A child is distributing morning papers; she is a little girl who has Saint Vitus's dance; she jerks her angular body in all directions, twitches her shoulders, blinks, hustles from door to door, climbs the stairs in the high-storied houses, presses bells, and hurries on, leaving papers on every doorstep. A dog follows her and makes every trip with her.
The public has high pretensions to considerable critical judgment and literary and dramatic taste, and scouts the idea of being led by the opinion of New York.... It is rather tiresome that fools are cut upon the same pattern all the world over. What is the profit of traveling? Oh dear! I think my Fazio has got St. Vitus's dance!...
Whereby, in the Affairs of England, there has, as it were, universal St.-Vitus's dance supervened, at an important crisis: and the Preparations for America, and for a downright Life-and-Death Wrestle with France on the JENKINS'S-EAR QUESTION, are quite in a bad way. In an ominously bad. Why cannot we draw a veil over these things!"
Vitus's dance was already on the decline at the commencement of the seventeenth century, the subsequent events were altogether adverse to its continuance.
"The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" was what is known as a "water picture," and "Doug," as a comedy detective, was compelled to make a human submarine of himself, not to mention several duels in the dark with Japanese thugs and opium smugglers. "Another day of it," he grinned, "and I'd have grown fins." "Manhattan Madness" was really nothing more than St. Vitus's dance set to ragtime.
Vitus's music; the very drawers disappeared; the alligator itself twirled round, as if revivified by so harsh an experiment on the nervous system; and I verily believe the whole museum, bull, wings, Indian canoe, and Calmuc Tartar, would have been set into motion by this new Orpheus, had not Tarleton, in a paroxysm of rage, seized him by the tail of the coat, and whirled him round, fiddle and all, with such velocity that the poor musician lost his equilibrium, and falling against a row of Chinese monsters, brought the whole set to the ground, where he lay covered by the wrecks that accompanied his overthrow, screaming and struggling, and grasping his fiddle, which every now and then, touched involuntarily by his fingers, uttered a dismal squeak, as if sympathizing in the disaster it had caused, until the drawer ran in, and, raising the unhappy antiquarian, placed him on a great chair.
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