SUPERSTITIONS OF SELBORNE. 22"f 



that, by such a process, the poor babes would be 

 cured of their infirmity. As soon as the opera- 

 tion 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 vil- 

 lage, who, in their childhood, were supposed to be 

 healed by this superstitious ceremony, derived, 

 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 l : 

 for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so 



1 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 immediately 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. 



