At the junction our road ceases. To continue our westward course we must go along the Ermine Street for half a mile, either northward or southward, where we shall find lanes, either of which will carry us on. The northern lane here will take us along the line of the hill, to Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, Potton, and, finally, Bedford, and will enable us, if we will, to explore the three Hadleys (East Hadley, Hadley St. George, and Cockayne Hadley), of which the two last have fine halls and parks. The southern, however, is the preferable route. It follows the course of the infant Cam, crossed by a bridge on the Ermine Street, and brings us first to the wholly obliterated Shingay, which, though once the most important parish hereabouts, and still giving its name to the Rural Deanery, has absolutely ceased to exist, church and all; its parishioners being affiliated to the neighbouring village of Wendy. The cause of this ruin was the suppression, at the Reformation, of the institution which was literally the life of Shingay, a House of the Crusading Order of St. John of Jerusalem, or, as they were commonly called, the Knights Hospitallers. This title was given them because, at their original foundation, they dwelt in a Hospital (or house for the hospitable entertainment of pilgrims) at Jerusalem. We now connect this name only with places where the sick are ministered to; but it originally connoted far wider ministrations, and, indeed, rather corresponded to the other form in which the word has survived into our present speech--hotel. We read it on a leaden seal found here at Wendy, in 1876, which bears on one side a conventional representation of the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by the legend IHERVSALEM, HOSPITALIS. On the other is the name of Guarin de Montaigu, who, from 1232 to 1269, was Grand Master of the Order. The Hospitallers, as readers of "Ivanhoe" know, were, like the Templars, a military Order, who, for over six centuries, fought unceasingly for Christendom. First at Jerusalem, then at Rhodes, then at Malta, they held out with never-failing devotion against the on-sweeping torrent of Mahommedan aggression; and it is scarcely too much to say that but for their eight-pointed cross Christianity might well have been crushed throughout Europe. Not till the nineteenth century was their last stronghold, Malta, reft from them by Napoleon, to pass finally under the flag of England. The Order still survives, but the modern sodality calling itself by the same name, connected with what we now call hospital work, was set up in quite recent days.