144 NATURAL HISTORY OP SELBOKNE. 



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 ourselves 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 enabled to make 

 any efforts adequate to the occasion. 



Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on the super- 

 stitions 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 remem- 

 ber, 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 sup- 

 posed, would prove in- 

 effectual. Having oc- 

 casion 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 per- 

 sons now living in the 

 village, who, in their 

 SHREW-MOUSE, childhood, were sup- 



posed to be healed by 



this superstitious ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon 

 ancestors, who practised it before their conversion to Christianity. 



At the fourth 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 



