A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up a dance at
Hazen's cheese factory, out in the country a spell ago. The people around
there are quiet, sober country people, who confine themselves in dancing,
to plain quadrilles and country dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or
a plain waltz. 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. Well, a party of these kind of
dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people were gathered,
and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers struck up an old
fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were going into spasms to get
ready to wade in, the floor filled with the country couples, who were
waltzing around old fashioned, when all of a sudden those Ripon people
began to work. They flopped across the cheese factory, knocked down a
couple from Pickett's Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across the
hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to call her
girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would catch those Ripon
cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay and called for her
husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a basket. In less than two
minutes all the other dancers hauled off, and stood on benches and looked
at them. Some of the country girls hid their heads and said they wanted to
go home. The visitors slid around the hall, caught each other on the fly,
run the bases, and come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who
played second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was present, and
told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and take them to the
Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The young men explained
that they were not crazy, and that it was only a new kind of dance, and
they were reluctantly allowed to remain, on condition that they "wouldn't
cut up any more of them city monkey shines, not afore folks."