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 plas- 

 tered 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 pleft continued to gape, the operation, it was 

 supposed, would prove ineffectual. Having occa- 

 sion to enlarge my garden not long since, 1 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 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 

 asfes 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 

 wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or 



sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel 



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