These young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a
wolf, and they have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and
Newport colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of waltz, but
the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it for the first
time just leans against something and fans himself. When the music strikes
up a waltz the young man opens his arms and doubles himself up like a boy
with the cholera infantum, his hind leg cramps and his head lops over on
one side, and he looks sick, his back humps up like a case of chronic
inflammatory rheumatism, and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when
he begins to have spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets
up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of
joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she
dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a
moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the
mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run
into by an engine. They teeter up and down a little, and then fly off on a
tangent, and they flop around in unexpected places among the other
dancers, jump like a box car, bump against other couples, and at every
bump they are driven closer together, until they are so near that it does
seem as though they will have to be pried apart with a handspike;
they look into each other's eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
going around till their backs are broke.
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