In
Mecklenburg the afterbirth is thrown out at the foot of a young
tree, and the child is then believed to grow with the tree. Near the
Castle of Dalhousie, not far from Edinburgh, there grows an
oak-tree, called the Edgewell Tree, which is popularly believed to
be linked to the fate of the family by a mysterious tie; for they
say that when one of the family dies, or is about to die, a branch
falls from the Edgewell Tree. Thus, on seeing a great bough drop
from the tree on a quiet, still day in July 1874, an old forester
exclaimed, "The laird's deid noo!" and soon after news came that Fox
Maule, eleventh Earl of Dalhousie, was dead.
In England children are sometimes passed through a cleft ash-tree as
a cure for rupture or rickets, and thenceforward a sympathetic
connexion is supposed to exist between them and the tree. An
ash-tree which had been used for this purpose grew at the edge of
Shirley Heath, on the road from Hockly House to Birmingham. "Thomas
Chillingworth, son of the owner of an adjoining farm, now about
thirty-four, was, when an infant of a year old, passed through a
similar tree, now perfectly sound, which he preserves with so much
care that he will not suffer a single branch to be touched, for it
is believed the life of the patient depends on the life of the tree,
and the moment that is cut down, be the patient ever so distant, the
rupture returns, and a mortification ensues, and terminates in
death, as was the case in a man driving a waggon on the very road in
question.
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