"Vitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Government strains every nerve to make the most of. Here are fasts, processions, Prayers of Forty-Hours; here, as in Vienna and elsewhere. In Vienna was a Three Days' solemn Fast: the like in Prag, or better; with procession to the shrine of St. Vitus,—little likely to help, I should fear. 'Rise, all fencible men,' exclaims the Government,—'at least we will ballot, and make you rise:'—Militia people enter Prag to the extent of 10,000; like to avail little, one would fear. General ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 7c. v.; twitter, flicker, flutter. turbulence, perturbation; commotion, turmoil, disquiet; tumult, tumultuation|; hubbub, rout, bustle, fuss, racket, subsultus[obs3], staggers, megrims, epilepsy, fits; carphology[obs3], chorea, floccillation[obs3], the jerks, St. Vitus's dance, tilmus[obs3]. spasm, throe, throb, palpitation, convulsion. disturbance, chaos &c. (disorder) 59; restlessness &c. (changeableness) 149. ferment, fermentation; ebullition, effervescence, hurly-burly, cahotage[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in a manner most distressing. Supposing the attack to be only temporary, I paused and, much to my relief, she soon showed signs of recovery; and in the course of time she came to a standstill looking up into my face in an inquiring sort of way, apparently wondering why St. Vitus had not paid his respects to me also. A second attempt to follow the music met with results similar to the first, and during the third attempt, which seemed to be trembling on the verge of a failure, St. Vitus let go my companion and seized me with such vigor that she, who was ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... the strongest side. The one will not conform to any common practice: the other will subscribe to any thriving system. The one is the slave of habit: the other is the sport of caprice. The first is like a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with St. Vitus's dance. He cannot stand still, he cannot rest upon any conclusion. 'He never is—but always ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Vitus, a Sicilian of considerable family, was brought up a christian; when his virtues increased with his years, his constancy supported him under all afflictions, and his faith was superior to the most dangerous ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... marry. The female jugglers are under no such restriction. They are generally chosen while children to be initiated in the mysteries of this profession, from among those who are most effeminate, and such as happen to be subject to epilepsy or St Vitus' dance are considered as especially marked out for the service of the jugglers. It is a very dangerous profession, as these jugglers are frequently put to death when any calamity happens to befal either the chiefs ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... long as I can remember, been very nervous and sensitive. When about seven years of age, I was attacked by St. Vitus' Dance. Before that I cannot say whether I was particularly nervous or not. Afterward it was impressed upon me by the remarks of relatives that I was nervous, so that I soon took note of this condition myself. The manner in which ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Mr. Pope alludes, appeared to me also, as I have elsewhere observed, to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance; and in this opinion I am confirmed by the description which Sydenham gives of that disease. 'This disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot. If the hand of the same side ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... I've just got him stowed away for the night. Had to take him out of earshot of the store and put him in limbo at Craney's shack, where he can't hear what's going on. I gave him a dose that would flatten out St. Vitus himself. There'll be no budging Case this night unless—but ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... with Louise. She had dropped in with a lady friend to drink a cup of coffee. From behind the receipt of custom he took an observation, and then he began to prance round, as one who had suddenly been attacked by a combination of the fire of St. Anthony and the dance of St. Vitus. He skipped around the saloon like a grasshopper on a gravel lot, and smiled, and smiled, and smiled—looking his Fourth-of-July prettiest. Of course Miss Ruff nudged her companion above the fifth ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... unintelligible. Decoded, it meant that I, whose betting pseudonym is Sanguine, wished to invest with Messrs. Lure, commission agents (not bookmakers, no, not for a moment), whose telegraphic address is "Pactolus, London," a sum of ten pounds (carburetter) on a horse called St. Vitus to win (stammer), and twenty pounds (tyre) for a place (scream). I had done this for various reasons, none really good, but chiefly because every paper that I had opened had urged me to do so, some even going so far as to dangle a double ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... TOOTHACHE—St Vitus dance, Epilepsy, Fevers, diseases of the eye, nose, antrum, throat, muscles, cholera, all diseases ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... the ruthless wheels of the social Juggernaut slowly crushing the beautiful form of liberty lying prostrate on the ground. * * * I saw men, women and children, without number, sacrificed on the altar of the capitalistic Moloch, and I beheld a race of pitiful creatures, stricken with the modern St. Vitus's dance at the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... old stronghold there called Lyndanissa that had fallen into decay. The crusaders busied themselves for two days with building another and better fort. On the third day, being St. Vitus' Day, they rested, fearing no harm. The Esthlanders had not troubled them. Some of their chiefs had even come in with an offer of surrender. They were willing to be converted, they said, and the priests were baptizing them after vespers, while the camp was making ready ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... as they here call it, an innocent, who has Saint Vitus dance into the bargain, and ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... a well-known name for erysipelas, and St. Vitus's dance for another distressing disease. These names came from the fact that these saints used to be chosen out as the special patrons of people suffering from such diseases. In the same way the disease which used to be called the King's ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Carrhae, to perform impious and cruel sacrifices in the sanctuary of Luno. A description of the crime is given by Theodoretus in Book III. ch. xxvi. At that time Carrhae, in spite of its devotion to the old religion, had a bishop named Vitus, who died in 381, and was succeeded by Protogenes. According to Theodoretus, he succeeded in "cultivating that wild field which had been covered with idolatrous thorns." Aurelius Theophilus was probably a contemporary of these events, as the inscription on his tombstone belongs undoubtedly to the ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the child apparently by a process like inoculation, and the child is from the first affected; such cases may be here passed over. Large classes of diseases usually appear at certain ages, such as St. Vitus's dance in youth, consumption in early mid-life, gout later, and apoplexy still later; and these are naturally inherited at the same period. But even in diseases of this class, instances have been recorded, as with St. Vitus's {78} dance, showing that an unusually early or late tendency ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... was always performed and accepted with a gravity that was an essential feature of the dance. At such times sighs would escape him which were supposed to portray the incipient stages of passion; snorts of jealousy burst from him at the suggestion of a rival; he was overtaken by a sort of St. Vitus's dance that expressed his timidity in making the first advances of affection; the scorn of his ladylove struck him with something like a dumb ague; and a single gesture of invitation from her produced marked delirium. All this was very like Enriquez; but on the particular ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive imitations on occasions of less tragic character. It is reported that in the eighteenth century papal Rome was indignant ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... they still carry, to his lonely shrine, epileptics and others distraught in mind. And were I in a discursive mood, I would endeavour to trace some connection between his establishment here and the tarantella—between St. Vitus' dance and that other one which cured, they say, the bite of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that— Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer't not thou St. Vitus' imp —away, thou ague! Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well .. done! Let me touch the axis. So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... was eleven I left the ranch and came to Oakland, where I spent so much of my time in the Free Public Library, eagerly reading everything that came to hand, that I developed the first stages of St. Vitus' dance from lack of exercise. Disillusions quickly followed, as I learned more of the world. At this time I made my living as a newsboy, selling papers in the streets; and from then on until I was sixteen I had a thousand and one different occupations—work and ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... I had bought a connection in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice; but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus's dance from which he suffered, had very much thinned it. The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... said, with decision, "and only enter. Valets do not usually enter a room shouting college songs or with St. Vitus's dance in their faces; so the contrary may be assumed without ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... again. * * * So I went up and down the streets crying, Woe to the bloody city, Lichfield! And there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood." In Germany it was called St. John's or St. Vitus's dance. And long before its first appearance in that precise form, in 1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret of the bacchanalian orgies among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... good luck it was not safe to loiter near the place after dark, if you wished to keep your senses. And if you took so much as a fallen apple belonging to Miss Betty, you might look out for palsy or St. Vitus' dance, or be carried off bodily to ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... effects subsided, and the graves of its 25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping, furious screaming, and foaming ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... You haven't got St. Vitus' dance, have you? I never heard there were any Tarantula spiders here. You don't go dancing into the Doctor's room, do you? He'll give you a dancing lesson!' said the old gentleman, sitting down again to chuckle, and looking ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Rome, is as much a profession as praying and shop-keeping. Happy is he who is born stroppiato, with a withered limb, or to whom Fortune sends the present of a hideous accident or malady; it is a stock to set up trade upon. St. Vitus's dance is worth its hundreds of scudi annually; epileptic fits are also a prize; and a distorted leg and hare-lip have a considerable market value. Thenceforth the creature who has the luck to have them is absolved from labor. He stands or lies in the sun, or wanders through the Piazza, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... need of it in order to endure all the stupidities that I hear! You can not imagine to what a degree they have reached. France which has been sometimes taken with St. Vitus dance (as under Charles VI), seems to me now to have a paralysis of the brain. They are mad with fear. Fear of the Prussians, fear of the strikes, fear of the Exposition which does not go well, fear of everything. We have to go back to 1849 to find ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... festivals mentioned, there were five banquets annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus, St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha's Day was ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... turned to the adjoining table where a younger man was sewing up a forearm, ripped from wrist to elbow by a piece of shell. "Lend me your saw, will you, Martin?—Yes, I know the heat's fearful! but I can't work by a lamp that has Saint Vitus!" He turned back to his table. "Now, my lad, you just clench your teeth. Miss Cary and I aren't going to hurt you any more than we can help. Yes, above the knee." The younger surgeon, having finished the cut, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus's Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, "the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters." All accounts agree that his strange gesticulations ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... countries have found out what even temporary absence means. A house without a man in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. It is as pleasant as Mark Twain's celebrated combination of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate machine ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... all its resources of science and art—its music and painting and costumes, its poets and composers, its actors, singers, orchestra, and audience—had all at once fallen victims to an attack of St. Vitus' dance. He sat and listened, while the theatre full of people roared and howled its applause; while the family beside him—mother and father and daughters—laughed over jokes that made him ashamed to turn and look at them. In the end the realization of what this ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance—eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... put him in the cage. A tempest in a teapot! Cheri went immediately into fits and furies. He hopped about convulsively. You might have supposed him attacked simultaneously with St. Anthony's fire, St. Vitus's dance, and delirium tremens. He shrieked, he writhed, he yelled, he raved. The chicken was stupid. If he had exerted himself a little to be agreeable, if he had only shown the smallest symptom of interest or curiosity or desire to cultivate an acquaintance, I have ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... victim of St. Vitus' dance. There you have an illustration of wasted energy. And it is mental energy, for every muscular movement represents the release of thought power. The mental lives of most men are equally aimless. They are lives ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... was afflicted with a species of dance—not that of Saint Vitus, but a sort of double-shuffle, with a stamp of the right foot at the end—in which he was prone to indulge, consciously and unconsciously, at all times, and the tendency to which he sometimes found ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... quassation^; shuffling &c v.; twitter, flicker, flutter. turbulence, perturbation; commotion, turmoil, disquiet; tumult, tumultuation^; hubbub, rout, bustle, fuss, racket, subsultus^, staggers, megrims, epilepsy, fits; carphology^, chorea, floccillation^, the jerks, St. Vitus's dance, tilmus^. spasm, throe, throb, palpitation, convulsion. disturbance, chaos &c (disorder) 59; restlessness &c (changeableness) 149. ferment, fermentation; ebullition, effervescence, hurly-burly, cahotage^; tempest, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... soon went into service; of the boys the oldest, Georgie, stayed at home, the second, Vitus by name, went to the Shuller Farm, and the third—well, I am going to tell ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Murtagh MacMurchada, Aillil Molt, Mag Mell and Donnchad Bodb, they form a galaxy of talent which, alike for the euphony of its nomenclature and the elasticity of its technique, has never been equalled since the days of ST. VITUS. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... Innsbruck stalked into the chamber, and arranged themselves along the walls, which spread into dimly-lighted aisles and arches. On the painted windows he saw Interlachen, withits Franciscan cloister, and the Square Tower of the ruins. In a pendent, overhead, stood the German student, as Saint Vitus; and on a lavatory, or basin of holy-water, below, sat a cherub, with the form and features of Berkley. Then the organ-pipes began to blow, and he heard the voices of an invisible choir chanting. And anon the gilded gates in the bronze screen ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... occasion for a bell to announce it, for every glass on the table was dancing to its own jingling music. And when the covers were taken off, it was still more absurd—everything in the dishes appeared to be infected with Saint Vitus's dance. The boiled leg of mutton shook its collops of fat at a couple of fowls which figured in a sarabande round and round their own dish,—roast beef shifted about with a slow and stately movement—a ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... room, thereby proving how much superior a cow-boy from New Hampshire is to the wretched resident of the city, whom fate has made a base and villainous gentleman. The PLAUSIBLE VILLAIN goes through with a complicated fit of St. Vitus's Dance, by way of preserving a cool exterior, and thus allaying the suspicions of PETER. Various TEDIOUS PEOPLE enter and converse tediously with the IRRELEVANT PEOPLE. After a time the stage-carpenters suddenly decide to lower the curtain, and thus put an end ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... hope and trust thy Tick doleru, or however you spell it, is vanished, for I have frightful impressions of that Tick, and do altogether hate it, as an unpaid score, or the Tick of a Death Watch. I take it to be a species of Vitus's dance (I omit the Sanctity, writing to "one of the men called Friends"). I knew a young Lady who could dance no other, she danced thro' life, and very queer and fantastic were her steps. Heaven bless thee from such measures, and keep thee ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... translated into plain English, meant, "If you trouble me, I will overlook (i. e. fascinate) you, and then your pigs will die, your horses stray, your cream turn sour, your barns be fired, your son have St. Vitus's dance, your daughter fits, and so on, woe on woe, till you are very probably starved to death in a ditch, by virtue of this terrible little eye of mine, at which, in spite of all your swearing and bullying, you know you are now shaking in your shoes for fear. So you had much better ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and the stocking cap that partially concealed her white hair was crowned by a panama hat that flopped down on all sides except where the brim was fastened up across the front with two conspicuous "safety-first" pins. Addie's eyesight is poor, and she claims it was "plum ruint by de St. Vitus's dance," from which she has suffered for many years. She readily agreed to tell of her early life, and her eyes brightened as she began: "Lawsy, Missy! Is dat what you come 'ere for? Oh, dem good old days! I was thinkin' 'bout ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... recommend a similar prescription to the sleepless; and I can assure them that there is much verse lately printed, and by people who plume themselves no little upon it, that need not be gone over more than twice at furthest; excepting the person may have Saint Vitus dance, and then a third time may be necessary. I would specify some of these works, were it at all necessary; but the afflicted have only to ask, at random, for the last published volume of poems, or to take ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Vitus Behring, a Dane, and Alexis Tschirikow, a Russian, who had both given many a proof of skill and knowledge, were appointed to the command of the expedition, which consisted of two vessels built at Kamtchatka. They were ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... recognition, looking, in fact, like bags full of rags. One woman, suffering from hydrocephalus, sat in a little cart, the dolorous motions of her head bespeaking her grievous malady. A tall girl afflicted with chorea—St. Vitus's dance—was dancing with every limb, without a pause, the left side of her face being continually distorted by sudden, convulsive grimaces. A younger one, who followed, gave vent to a bark, a kind of plaintive ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... said, and he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping an instant, just as if he had Saint Vitus's dance. "Ain't I a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... seemed a death dance, grotesque, convulsive, hideous. Paris, Nice, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Vienna, London writhed and twisted and turned and jiggled. St. Vitus himself never imagined contortions such as these. In the narrow side-street dance rooms of Florence, and in the great avenue restaurants of Paris they were performing exactly the same gyrations—wiggle, squirm, shake. And over all the American jazz music boomed and whanged its syncopation. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... dodged about with every turn of the quick tune. A stranger, not understanding the state of mind into which a negro gets after playing "The devil among the tailors," would have supposed he was afflicted with St. Vitus's dance. The mistake would soon have been perceived, for two of the boys having tired themselves out with manoeuvres of every kind, were obliged to sit down to get some breath, and Bacchus fell into a sentimental mood, after a ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... her curls and out her chest. "That is a fine excuse. I'm stronger than most. All youngsters have measles and scarlet fever and Fred says his sister Lucile out in Des Moines had St. Vitus' dance when she was eleven, just like I did. I'm stronger than you are, dad. I didn't get the ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... encountered Caleb Plummer leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, St. Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief from ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Hence the curious cases in which a child simulates, I do not say dissimulates, the malady it sees constantly before it, as when one child has attacks of false epilepsy, owing to having seen the real attack in a sister or brother, or when St. Vitus's dance runs through a school ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... boy?" he demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit down an' quit frettin' people with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the Minnesota ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... a nervous twitching of the eye at all times, and when he was excited the muscles of his face all jerked in unison like Saint Vitus' dance. At my question every muscle in his face, as the Princeton man in Bee's boat ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... and accurate. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he wore boots and a very wide ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores to find the Western Sea, it would—as one of the French governors reported—"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France to discover this "sea ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut |
