erican
negroes. According to the old philosophy of planetary influences, the
Ash tree is peculiar to the sun; whereas serpents are consecrated to
dark and gloomy Saturn--another cause for the antipathy between them,
and illustrative of the reason why the ailing child should be borne
around in reference to the imaginary sympathetic solar rays of the tree.

All trivial enough, doubtless; no longer a matter worthy of deep
research and wise marvelling. It is not even worth the while now for
scholars to inveigh against the folly of such superstition. There was
indeed enough of it. It was believed that by boring a hole in an ashen
bough and imprisoning a mouse in it, a magic rod was obtained which
would cure lameness and cramps in cattle--the ailments being transferred
to the poor mouse, who was the supposed cause of them all. 'There is a
proverb, says Loudon (_Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum_, p. 1223,
edition of 1838), 'in the midland countries, that if there are no keys
on the Ash trees, there will be no king within the twelvemonth.'
Lightfoot says that in many parts of the Highlands of Scotland, at the
birth of a child, the nurse or midwife puts one end of a green stick of
this tree into the fire, and, while it is burning, gathering in a spoon
the sap or juice, which oozes out at the other end, administers this as
the first spoonful of food to the newly-born baby.' Trivial enough, yet
worth noting as the fragments and humble remains of what was once the
mighty mythology of the Northmen, hinting at the faith in the
life-giving and life-preserving qualities of the great tree of life--the
tree of knowledge of good and evil--the _eritis sicut Deus_ of Runic
lore.

Among the strangest and most beautiful after-echoes of this old Norse
faith in the magic Ash as the great tree of life, is to my mind, one
which has been preserved by Grimm in his 'Mythology' (2d edition, 2d
book, page 912), and which the German poet Hoffmann has happily turned
in a poem full of spirit and grace. The legend is as follows:

In the churchyard at Nortorf will one day be an Ash,
No human eye hath seen it, yet silently it grows
Among the graves, and every year it bears a single sprout.
Each New Year's night a rider white upon a snow-white steed,
Comes silently among the graves to hew the sprout away;
But there comes a coal-black rider upon a coal-black horse,
And he strives to save the new-born tree and drive the foe afar: