176 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, 
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 had been cleft asunder. These trees, when young 
and flexible, were severed and held open by wedges, while 
ruptured children 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 feat was over, the 
tree, in the suffering part, was plastered with loam, and care- 
fully swathed up. Ifthe 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 supersti- 
tious ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ances- 
tors, 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. Nowa 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 — 
