332 



ct Notes on some Wiltshire Superstitions" 



flexible were severed and held open by wedges, while ruptured 

 children, stripped naked, were pushed through the apertures, under 

 the 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 when 

 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 We have several 



persons now living in the village who in their childhood were sup- 

 posed to be healed by this superstitious ceremony, derived down 

 perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who practised it before their con- 

 version to Christianity. " 1 



Cure of the " Yaller Jarndice" at a distance without visiting 

 the sick man, without medicine, by inspection and burning of urine. 

 In 1876 an old man, lying ill with jaundice, sent up pretty regularly 

 for a month, a bottle of his urine to a man named E. S. of Spirthill, 

 about two miles off, who was, as this old man believed, able to cure 

 him, without seeing him or prescribing anything for him, by merely 

 looking at the urine, and doing " something" to it. The old man 

 had several wonderful stories about persons, some of them medical 

 men, whom he believed this E. S. had cured in a similar way. 

 This poor old man was not cured, and died soon afterwards. E. S. 

 is " out " when I call, but his wife bears testimony to her husband's 

 possession of this miraculous power. He had cured a man at Calne 

 with whom the doctors could do nothing. His father and mother 

 before him could do it ; she could do it, if her husband were agreeable. 



1 I recollect just such a case occurring here (Old Park, Devizes), some fifty 

 years ago, when I was a boy ; and I can still call to mind my father's face, 

 partly of amusement and partly of indignation, when he came in and told us of 

 the young ash tree in a plantation which he had just seen carefully tied up, not 

 without a plastering of manure, and through which the naked child of one of the 

 labourers on the estate had been passed through at sunrise on a remarkably cold 

 spring morning. Whether the ash tree lived, and whether the child recovered, I 

 know not, for I cannot identify either the one or the other. [Ed.] See Maga- 

 zine, vol. xiv., p. 323. 



