A Suffolk child told Chambers’s correspondent that it was quite safe to shelter from a thunderstorm under an elder tree. The cross, he said, had been made of elder, and so lightning never struck it. The correspondent set beside it a belief noted by Dean Trench, that the aspen shakes because the cross was made of its wood and it has trembled ever since.
The Elder and the Lightning
Printed under 7 September · Suffolk
Lore and belief
you will be quite safe under an eldern-tree, because the cross was made of that, and so the lightning never strikes it.
From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 2, p. 322. Read the original
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