“Nary.”

“There’s one been round here for three or four days, pretty bad off; ’s got the St. Vitus’s.  He wanted me to get him some medicine for it up to Antigonish.  I’ve got it here in a vial, and I wished you could take it to him.”

“Where is he?”

“I dunno.  I heern he’d gone east by the Gut.  Perhaps you’ll hear of him.”  All this screamed out into the night.

“Well, I’ll take it.”

We took the vial aboard and went on; but the incident powerfully affected us.  The weird voice of the old woman was exciting in itself, and we could not escape the image of this unknown man, dancing about this region without any medicine, fleeing perchance by night and alone, and finally flitting away down the Gut of Canso.  This fugitive mystery almost immediately shaped itself into the following simple poem: 

“There was an old man of Canso,
Unable to sit or stan’ so. 
When I asked him why he ran so,
Says he, ‘I’ve St. Vitus’ dance so,
All down the Gut of Canso.’”

This melancholy song is now, I doubt not, sung by the maidens of
Antigonish.

In spite of the consolations of poetry, however, the night wore on slowly, and soothing sleep tried in vain to get a lodgment in the jolting wagon.  One can sleep upright, but not when his head is every moment knocked against the framework of a wagon-cover.  Even a jolly young Irishman of Plaster Cove, whose nature it is to sleep under whatever discouragement, is beaten by these circumstances.  He wishes he had his fiddle along.  We never know what men are on casual acquaintance.  This rather stupid-looking fellow is a devotee of music, and knows how to coax the sweetness out of the unwilling violin.  Sometimes he goes miles and miles on winter nights to draw the seductive bow for the Cape Breton dancers, and there is enthusiasm in his voice, as he relates exploits of fiddling from sunset till the dawn of day.  Other information, however, the young man has not; and when this is exhausted, he becomes sleepy again, and tries a dozen ways to twist himself into a posture in which sleep will be possible.  He doubles up his legs, he slides them under the seat, he sits on the wagon bottom; but the wagon swings and jolts and knocks him about.  His patience under this punishment is admirable, and there is something pathetic in his restraint from profanity.

It is enough to look out upon the magnificent night; the moon is now high, and swinging clear and distant; the air has grown chilly; the stars cannot be eclipsed by the greater light, but glow with a chastened fervor.  It is on the whole a splendid display for the sake of four sleepy men, banging along in a coach,—­an insignificant little vehicle with two horses.  No one is up at any of the farmhouses to see it; no one appears to take any interest in it, except an occasional baying dog, or a rooster that has mistaken the time of night.  By midnight we come to Tracadie,