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suasion 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 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 

 anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the 

 limb. Against this accident, to which they were con- 

 tinually liable, our provident fore-fathers always kept a 

 shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would 

 maintain its virtues for ever. A shrew-ash was made 

 thus : * — Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored 



* For a similnr practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. 



