With gems and gold the trees are brave,
While spices that the East might crave
Float up beneath my feet.
Rosalie Arthur.
AMERICA’S SOCIAL HOUSE OF PEERS
By Anne Rittenhouse
THE Dancing Assemblies of Philadelphia and the St. Cecilia Society of Charleston, South Carolina, are the two oldest subscription balls in the world. Their invitations for this winter mark three centuries in which the elect of the Quaker and the Huguenot cities have been invited to dance and to pay the fiddler.
The South Carolinians contend that their famous dance is older than the Philadelphia one. Both began in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the invitations went out through the rest of the century, the whole of the nineteenth, and through a half decade of the twentieth century.
The exact date of the first St. Cecilia is not quite authenticated, because the great fire which swept over Charleston in 1865 destroyed St. Andrew’s Hall, where the records of this dance were kept. The flames also melted the magnificent silver that had belonged to the society for over a hundred years.