In one of the earliest chapters of this book you have read of the 'making of Cheshire'. We have brought the story of Cheshire down to the present day, but Cheshire is not yet 'made'. Many and wonderful changes there have been since our ancestors shot wild beasts with their flinty arrow-heads, and devoured raw flesh in the pits and caverns of Alderley Edge. The people of Cheshire, who have struggled through long centuries to win for themselves light and liberty, have never turned their faces backwards. With steadfast purpose and unfaltering steps they march forward on the way of progress. The 'making' still goes on; and there is plenty of work to do for the Cheshire boys and girls of to-day, that they may help to make their county a better place to live in than they found it. Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour. The great families of Cheshire whose names recur so often in these pages were proud of the mottoes written beneath their crests and coats of arms. The words inscribed on the village cross which the boys and girls of Eastham pass on their way to school, are the best mottoes that all Cheshire school-children can take for their own: 'Fear God. Honour the King. Work while it is yet day.' And the day is very short. As the lines on a tombstone in Little Peover churchyard remind us: A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day, Is all the greatest of us have Between the cradle and the grave. INDEX Acton, 126. Adlington, 141, 161. Aethelfrith, 44. Aethelred, 50. Agricola, 36-8. _Alabama_, the, 203. Alderley Edge, 15, 18, 25, 42. Aldford, 20, 61. Alfred the Great, 51. Almshouses, 147. Altrincham, 88, 208. Anne, Queen, 171. Anselm, 64. Archery, 110. Architecture, Saxon, 50; Norman, 65-71; Early English, 81-6; Decorated, 101-4; Perpendicular, 120-2; Elizabethan, 137-42; Eighteenth-Century, 173-6. Arden Hall, 142. Armada, Spanish, 134. Astbury, 45, 104. Aston, Sir Thomas, 156. Athelstan, 55.