206 



NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



were severed and held open by wedges, while ruptured children, 

 stripped naked, were pushed through the apertures, under a per- 

 suasion that, by such a process, the poor babes would be cured of 

 their infirmity. As soon as the operation was over, the tree, in 

 the suffering part, was plastered with loam, and carefully swathed 

 up. If the parts coalesced and soldered together, as usually fell 

 out, where the feat was performed with any adroitness at all, the 

 party was cured; but, where the cleft continued to gape, the 

 operation, it was supposed, would prove ineffectual. Having 



THE SHREW 



occasion to enlarge my garden not long since, I cut down two 

 or three such trees, one of which did not grow together. 



We have several persons now living in the village, who, in their 

 childhood, were supposed to be healed by this superstitious 

 ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who 

 practised it before their conversion to Christianity. 



At the fourth corner of the Plestor, or area, near the church, 

 there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow 

 pollard-ash, which for ages had been looked on with no small 

 veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose 

 twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will 



