144 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
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 
ivas 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. , ' chlldhood, 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 
