i/4 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



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 

 superannuated wretches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed 

 with infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft; and, by 

 trying experiments, 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 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 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 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 sup- 

 posed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious 

 a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, 

 cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel 



