Happily there was a certain antidote against the evil wrought by this malevolent beast. A large ash-tree being chosen, a deep hole was made in its trunk, and after certain incantations were made a shrew-mouse was thrust alive into the opening, and the hole securely plugged. “A shrew-ash,” says Gilbert White in his “Natural History of Selborne,” “is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pain which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected. Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which when once medicated would maintain its virtue for ever.” One of these shrew-ashes, now but a fragment of what was evidently once a massive stately tree, may still be seen near the Sheen Gate in Richmond Park, and there are those still living who can remember cattle and horses being brought to it for its healing virtues. The horse does not seem to have so much unnatural history associated with him as we might have anticipated, such stories as that of the feeding of the horses of Diomed with human flesh, or of the milk-white steed, Al Borak, of Mohammed, each of whose strides was equal to the furthest range of human vision, being altogether fabulous and mythical. Diomed, the tyrant of Thrace, seems to have held out very little encouragement to immigrants or wandering tourists, if the legend be true that he utilized them as fodder. “Here such dire welcome is for thee prepared As Diomed’s unhappy strangers shared; His hapless guests at silent midnight bled, On their torn limbs his snorting coursers fed.”[60] One meets with many famous steeds in classical and mediæval literature, but these, of course, are individual examples of the race, and anything told of them can scarcely be considered as testifying to the general though erroneous notions entertained on the subject of horses generally. The horse Bayard, for example, the property of the four Sons of Aymon, had a most useful peculiarity in that he grew larger or smaller in fair proportion to his rider, according as the big stalwart brother of six feet high, or the little fellow not yet in his teens got astride him. One of the horses of Achilles is said to have announced to his master his impending death. It is sufficiently evident that expanding, contracting, and talkative horses are altogether outside the ordinary pale.