alus, 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 animal cry, each time that the tic douloureux which was
torturing her twisted her mouth and her right cheek, which she seemed to
throw forward. Next came the consumptives, trembling with fever,
exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons, with livid skins, recalling
the colour of that earth in which they would soon be laid to rest; and
there was one among them who was quite white, with flaming eyes, who
looked indeed like a death's head in which a torch had been lighted. Then
every deformity of the contractions followed in succession--twisted
trunks, twisted arms, necks askew, all the distortions of poor creatures
whom nature had warped and broken; and among these was one whose right
hand was thrust back behind her ribs whilst her head fell to the left
resting fixedly upon her shoulder. Afterwards came poor rachitic girls
displaying waxen complexions and slender necks eaten away by sores, and
yellow-faced women in the painful stupor which falls on those whose
bosoms are devoured by cancers; whilst others, lying down with their
mournful eyes gazing heavenwards, seemed to be listening to the throbs of
the tumours which obstructed their organs. And still more and more went
by; there was always something more frightful to come; this woman
following that other one increased the general shudder of horror. From
the neck of a girl of twenty who had a crushed, flattened head like a
toad's, there hung so large a goitre that it fell even to her waist like
the bib of an apron. A blind woman walked along, her head erect, her face
pale like marble, displaying the acute inflammation of her poor,
ulcerated eyes. An aged woman stricken with imbecility, afflicted with
dreadful facial disfigurements, laughed aloud with a terrifying laugh.
And all at once an epileptic was seized with convulsions, and began
foaming on her stretcher, without, however, causing any stoppage of the
procession, which never slackened its march, lashed onward as it was by
the blizzard of feverish passion which impelled it towards the Grotto.

The bearers, the priests, and the ailing ones themselves had just
intonated a can