Another such tributary rises in our next village, Melbourn, and runs, on its way to the Cam, through the adjoining Meldreth, an old-world place, where the parish stocks are still to be seen at the village cross-roads. Till the nineteenth century was well on its way, these instruments of punishment were in actual use for the correction of minor offences such as vagrancy. They consist of a low upright frame of rough wood, so contrived that the prisoner's feet, as he sat upon the ground beside it, were passed through holes in the structure and there secured. The parish constable was supposed to keep sentry over him, but actually seldom kept off either the friends, who might alleviate his captivity by beer and tobacco, or the more numerous enemies, who found it a good joke to tease and pelt his helplessness. The hands were sometimes also secured, sometimes not; but in any case the culprit's situation was exceedingly unpleasant, and the stocks proved a most wholesome deterrent. [Illustration: _Shepreth._] Melbourn is a larger place, and boasts that rare possession, a village trysting-tree. This is a huge elm, standing by the roadside at the churchyard gate. It is now at the extremity of elm life, some three hundred years old, and only the stump (still clothed with leafage) remains. But the vast massiveness of the roots show its former grandeur. At this tree, in 1640, the villagers spontaneously gathered to resist the imposition of the "ship-money," whereby Charles the First was striving to recruit his exhausted exchequer. "And they fell upon the sheriff's men with stones and staves, and hedgestakes and forks, and beat them and wounded divers of them, and did drive them out of the highway into a woman's yard for their safety. And were forced for saving of their lives to get out of the town a back way; which, notwithstanding, some thirty or forty able men and boys pursued them above a quarter of a mile, stoning them, and driving the bailiffs into a ditch, where some of their horses stuck fast. And the multitude got some of the bailiffs' horses and carried them away, and would not redeem them without money." This stirring episode shows that the men of Melbourn were already Puritan stalwarts, a character which the place has ever since maintained. Three years later the parson himself removed from the church "sixty superstitious pictures," and a cross from the steeple, and digged down the altar steps. And after the Restoration, when Nonconformity was put under the straitest ban of the law, its worship still continued here to be practised, so that the place became, as it still remains, the chief centre of the Free Church form of religion in this part of the county.