1 64 WHITE 



When a tall youth he was removed from hence to a distant 

 village, where he died, as I understand, before he arrived at 



manhood. T 



I am, etc. 



NOTE 

 1 Wildman was a writer on bees and their management. G. C. D. 



LETTER XXVIII 



SELBORNE, Jan. Stti, 1776. 



DEAR SIR, It is the hardest thing in the world to shake 

 off superstitious prejudices : they are sucked in, as it were, 

 with our mother's milk ; and, growing up with us at a time 

 when they take the fastest hold and make the most lasting 

 impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, 

 that the strongest good sense is required to disengage our- 

 selves from them. No wonder, therefore, that the lower people 

 retain them their whole lives through, since their minds are 

 not invigorated by a liberal education, and therefore not en- 

 abled to make any efforts adequate to the occasion. 



Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on 

 the superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected 

 of exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this 

 enlightened age. 



But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well 

 to remember, that no longer ago than the year 1751, and 

 within twenty miles of the capital, they seized on two super- 

 annuated wretches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed with 

 infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft ; and, by trying experi- 

 ments, drowned them in a horse-pond. 



In a farm-yard near the middle of this village stands, at 

 this day, a row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and long 

 cicatrices down their sides, manifestly show that, in former 

 times, they have been cleft asunder. These trees, when young 

 and 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 



