Ad . mortem . duram . Jhesu . de . me . cape . curam . Vitam . venturam . post . mortem . redde . securam . Fac . me . confessum . rogo . te . Deus . ante . recessum . Et . post . decessum . caelo. mihi . dirige . gressum . "Jesu, in Death's dark vale, be Thou my stay, Make safe my Life to Come from every foe, Grant me Confession, Lord, ere hence I go, And then to Heaven do thou make straight my way." From Guilden Morden a lane leads straight to Ashwell, leaving on the left Steeple Morden (which lost its steeple in the great storm of 1703), and Littlington, the cradle of Cambridgeshire Nonconformity, of which hereafter. Here the old parish Lock-up survives; a dismal den of red brick, some ten feet square, with iron-clenched door and closely-barred window. CHAPTER XII Oxford Road, Observatory, Neptune, Cambridge Discoveries.--Coton.--Madingley.--Hardwick.--Toft, St. Hubert.--Childerley, Charles I.--Knapwell.--Bourn.--Caxton--Eltisley, St. Pandiana, Storm.--St. Neot's, Neotus and Alfred.--Paxton Hill.--Godmanchester, Port Meadow.--Huntingdon, Cromwell's Penance.--The Hemingfords.--St. Ives.--Holywell.--Overcote.--Earith, the Bedford Rivers, "Parallax." Due westwards from Cambridge, turning leftwards out of the Via Devana just beyond Magdalene College, runs what used to be the old coaching road to Oxford. Till quite recently the milestones along it gave the distance to that city, between which and Cambridge there was of old a good deal of traffic, for the Universities were more closely connected then than even now. Popularly this road was called the _Ad eundem_ road, a nickname referring to the not so long by-gone privilege by which any graduate of either place might be admitted to the same degree (_ad eundem gradum_) in the sister University simply on payment of the fees and without any further examination. It is now spoken of as the Madingley Road, from the first village along its course, or the St. Neots Road, from the first town to which it leads. Thence it went on to Oxford by way of Bedford, Buckingham, and Bicester. A short two miles along this road brings us to the porticoed front and white domes of the University Observatory, erected in 1822. More than a century earlier its embryo had been set up on the summit of the Great Gate Tower at Trinity College, for the benefit of Sir Isaac Newton; but this seems to have been little used after the death of that greatest of scientists. Even after the new Observatory was set up a certain lack of keenness pervaded its work. Thus it came about that Cambridge and England lost the glory of the discovery of Neptune, the most distant planet of our Solar System.