Sextius, whose name is preserved by an
inscription in the great baths he
reconstructed.

Enough of the Romans. Christians
transferred the dedication of the healing springs
to saints. There was a healing spring at
Patras, for example, to which a prophetic
power was ascribed by Pausanias, whose
description of the spot has enabled Mr. Clark,
a recent traveller in the Peloponnesus, to
identity it with a well, covered with Byzantine
masonry, and dedicated to Saint
Andrew. The fame of the underground shop
rests a good deal upon the fact that it is a
free dispensary, and sends its medicine out
gratis. Not even the gorgeous blue, green,
or red window bottle of the super-
terraneous chemist, even with all the voucher
of the cabalistic figures on its face, has
ever been accredited with a prophetic power.
Nor do I know any saint who has consented
to be answerable for the contents of doctor's
bottles.

In the history of ancient churches,
especially in Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland,
mention frequently occurs of wells which are
reputed holy, and are associated with the
history of old Cornish, British, or Irish
saints (whose names, if they do not belong to
an obsolete language, now sound outlandish
in the places where they used to dwell),
or of wells memorable as old places of
baptism. In many parts of Ireland,
pilgrimages to wells reputed holy, are still
common, and the customs observed are believed
by the peasantry—as they were believed
in the early days of Christianity—to be
preservative against spells of the fairies
and sorceries of the Druids. A visitor is at
this day, at many wells, expected to throw in
a crooked pin—an act noticed by some
Persian travellers as an Oriental custom,
apparently intended as a propitiatory offering
to the tutelary spirit of the fountain. Equally
remote, but less seemly—and also Persian
(there is a theory of the close kindred
between Erin and Iran)—is the custom of hanging
rags round the enclosure of a well in repute
for healing properties, as at the famous holy
well of Saint Winifred, in Flintshire, at
Madron Well, near Penzance.

But whatever may have been the merits
of the saint, the well seems, in most cases,
to owe its fame to medicinal virtues, or,
sometimes, to a mysterious property attributed to
its waters. In the case of the celebrated
Well of Saint Keyne, or Saint Kevin, near
Liskeard, such faith is still reposed in its
power to confer domestic authority that a
good cellarage full of Keyne water under the
Divorce Courts might be worth trying as a
means of settling matrimonial causes and
abating litigation. The well lies down a
green lane, a good run from the church
dedicated to the old British saint; and the
bride or bridegroom who first drinks the
water, gains the mastery, as we have all
read in Southey's ballad where the newly-
married man relates how he was outwitted:

    I hasten'd, as soon as the wedding was o'er,
    And stole from my bride in the porch;
    But the daughter of Eve had been wiser than I,
    For she took a bottle to church!

The reputed virtues of the saint's well near
Polperro have survived the edifice which
enclosed it. People suffering from inflamed
eyes and some other ailments still resort
to it, but not without observing certain
ceremonies. Saint Augustine's well, another
spring also reputed good for sore eyes, rises
in the western suburb of Leicester, near the
old Roman road; and in Carmarthenshire,
six miles from Llandilo Fawr, an out-of-the-
way well is resorted to for the same
complaint. So also is the spring known as Holy
Well, or Cefyn Bryn; and the well by the
chapel or hermitage of Saint Goven, on the
coast of Pembrokeshire, in a small bay
between Tenby and Milford Haven, below
which there is another spring, reached by a
descent of fifty-two steps, which is visited
from distant parts of Wales for the cure of
scrofula, and even paralysis. I am particular
in giving the address. The saint is said to
have been buried under the primitive altar
in the building which incloses this collyrium.

Some of the most favourite and celebrated
mineral springs in England and on the
continent are, however, of comparatively
recent discovery, and rise occasionally in
places which were solitudes, and which are
connected with no saintly legend. The instinct
of birds, it is said, first led to the discovery of
the Spa of Cheltenham. It was noticed in
the year seventeen hundred and sixteen that
flocks of pigeons daily resorted to the head of
a small stream, in a meadow near the town,
for the purpose of feeding on some white
saline particles deposited there by
evaporation of the water. The same kind of birds
had been seen to resort to the mineral spring
at Inverleithen (the Saint Ronan's Well of
Scott) before it acquired any celebrity. The
discovery of the healing waters of Schlangenbad,
in the Duchy of Nassau, is attributed to
the conduct of a cow,—the animal, which, it
will be remembered, led the monks to Durham,
as we read in the legend of Saint
Cuthbert. In Nassau, the story runs that
there was a heifer which wasted away, and
was given over, but which, after having been
absent for some weeks, re-appeared amongst
the herd in re-established health; whereupon
the herdsman took notice, and observed that
this animal, every evening, made its way into
the forest until it reached a spring, not
previously known, and drank from it. A young
lady, sometime afterwards, exhibiting
symptoms of the heifer's malady, was prevailed
upon to try the heifer's remedy, and became
one of the stoutest and comeliest of the
daughters of the duchy.

In like manner Bagnoles, in the department