The "Village Smithy" Is Not Doomed to Disappear--Miss Withey Says the British Claim Is "Entirely Spurious"

The village smithy which formerly stood "under the spreading chestnut tree" before the latter was felled is not doomed to disappear, as it was reported in the "New York Tribune" yesterday. This discovery was the result of an investigation conducted last night by a CRIMSON reporter.

The building in a Kentish village in England whose destruction is reported as imminent may in truth be about to disappear but the true village smithy still stands on Brattle Street in Cambridge, and no one is contemplating its demolition.

The claim of the British building to the honor of having inspired Longfellow's familiar verses is not the first to have come to light, but according to the owners of the "Cock Horse", a tavern which now occupies the home of the blacksmith, and to several old inhabitants of the district such claims are entirely spurious. "There is no truth in the story," said Miss Withey, who has lived next door to the blacksmith's house for over 70 years; when the reporter asked her if the true smithy were in England and not in Cambridge. "I remember playing under the tree as a child. When it was cut down a chair was made of it and presented to Mr. Longfellow, and the poet himself once painted a picture of the tree and the smithy which now hangs in the Longfellow House."