The Nine Wells are not easy to find. They are situated near the village of Great Shelford, under a shoulder of the Gog Magog Hills, and are approached across two rugged pastures, almost impracticable in wet weather. The term "wells" is misleading. They are springs, found trickling feebly through the white clay in the bed of a deep trench with two branches, cut in the hillside. Above them stands a granite obelisk erected by public subscription in 1861, and setting forth all the circumstances at great length. The term "Nine Wells" is not especially applied to this spot, but is used throughout Cambridgeshire for springs, whatever their number. A similar custom obtained in classic Greece, but the evidence by which our Cambridgeshire practice might possibly be derived from such a respectable source, and so be linked with the Pierian spring and the Muses Nine, is entirely lacking. [Illustration: HOBSON'S CONDUIT.] The Gog Magogs--"the Gogs," as the country-folk irreverently abbreviate their mysterious name--are the Cambridgeshire mountains. They are not particularly Alpine in character, being, indeed, just a series of gently rising grassy downs, culminating in a height of three hundred feet above sea-level. No one will ever be able to explain how these very mild hills obtained their terrific title; and Gog and Magog themselves, mentioned vaguely in Revelations, where the devil is let loose again after his thousand years' imprisonment in the bottomless pit, are equally inexplicable. The crowning height of the Gog Magogs was in Roman times the summer camp of a cohort of Vandals, quartered in this district to overawe the conquered British. It was then the policy of Rome, as it is of ourselves in India and elsewhere at the present day, to enrol into her service the strange tribes and alien nations she had conquered, and to bring them from afar to impress her newest subjects with the far-reaching might and glory of the Empire. This Vandalian cohort was formed from the barbarian prisoners defeated on the Danube by Aurelian, and enlisted by the Emperor Probus. The earthworks of their camp are still traceable within the grounds of the mansion and estate of Vandlebury, on the hilltop, once belonging to the Duke of Leeds. From this point of view Cambridge is seen mapped out below, while in other directions the great rolling fields spread downwards in fold upon fold. Immense fields they are, enclosed in the early years of last century, when Cambridgeshire began to change its immemorial aspect of open treeless downs, where the sheep grazed on the short grass and the bustard still lingered, for its present highly cultivated condition. Fields of this comparatively recent origin may generally be recognised by their great size, in striking contrast with the ancient enclosures whose area was determined by the work of hand-ploughing. These often measure over half a mile square, and mark the advent of the steam-plough. XXII