SUPERSTITIONS OF SELBORNE. 



flexible, were severed and held open by wedges, 

 while ruptured children, stripped naked, were pushed 

 through the apertures, under a persuasion 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 ineffec- 

 tual. Having 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, per- 

 haps, from our Saxon ancestors, who practised it 

 before their conversion to Christianity. 



At the south 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 immediately relieve the pains which a 

 beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over 

 the part affected * : for it is supposed that a shrew- 

 mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that 



* They were supposed, also, to be particularly injurious to 

 horses. " When a horse in the fields happened to be suddenly 

 seized with any thing like a numbness in his legs, he was imme- 

 diately judged by the old persons to be either planet-struck, or 

 shrew-struck. The mode of cure which they prescribed, and 

 which they considered in all cases as infallible, was to drag the 

 animal through a piece of bramble that grew at both ends." 

 BINGLEY'S Memoirs of British Quadrupeds. Cats will kill 

 shrews, but will not eat them. W. J. 



