" "It is not uncommon, however," adds the writer, "for
persons to survive for a time the felling of the tree." The ordinary
mode of effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling
longitudinally for a few feet and pass the child, naked, either
three times or three times three through the fissure at sunrise. In
the West of England it is said that the passage should be "against
the sun." As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is
bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay.
The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree closes up, so the
rupture in the child's body will be healed; but that if the rift in
the tree remains open, the rupture in the child will remain too, and
if the tree were to die, the death of the child would surely follow.
A similar cure for various diseases, but especially for rupture and
rickets, has been commonly practised in other parts of Europe, as
Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden; but in these countries the
tree employed for the purpose is usually not an ash but an oak;
sometimes a willow-tree is allowed or even prescribed instead.
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