upon their own resources, and to be compelled by ignorance to look upon every leaf as a possible poison is helplessness of the most wretched kind. The railway up the Agecroft valley is interesting as the first that was constructed after the Liverpool and Manchester, and perhaps the "Grand Junction." People used to go to the Prestwich hills to watch the trains scudding along. The scenery here is certainly not spoiled by it. For our own part, we consider that scenery is scarcely ever spoiled by the presence of railways, and would contend rather that they are a capital addition; for those spectacles are always most salutary to the mind, and therefore most truly pleasing, where along with rural beauties are combined the grand circumstances of human life and human enterprise. Railways count with bridges, ships, gardens, the castles and abbeys of the past, and the mansions of the present. Nature is beautiful, even in its most retired and lonely solitudes, just in the proportion that we connect with it, though unconsciously, the interests, the feelings, the aspirations of humanity; the more of what is noble and comely in human life we are able to assimilate with the outer world, the more does that world minister to our happiness and our intelligence. In the case of the railways, we are recipients of an immense amount of good. There is not only the interest of what is witnessed on the instant, but the pleasant flow of remembrance of the various localities they lead to. As, looking at the sea, we are led in thought all round the world, so, looking at the winged train and its pearly clouds, we visit over again a thousand delicious spots, photographed on the mind, and endeared by association. Here, for instance, in the valley of the Irwell, we go on to the lakes of Cumberland, and its ancient and purple mountains, and anon to the flowered and roofless aisles of sacred Furness. Should these be places yet unknown, there are nearer ones where we _have_ been,--Rivington, Summerseat, Hoghton Tower, with its precipitous beechen-wood and lovely walk by the river underneath; or Southshore, where grow the blue eryngo and the grass of Parnassus, and where, on calm September evenings, the round, red setting sun pours a stream of crimson light across the sea, that reaches to the last ripple of the retiring water, like a path of velvet unrolled for the feet of a queen; or, if the wind blow high and fresh, the grand old deep-voiced waves, with their gray locks hanging dishevelled over their broad bosoms, roll gloriously over the rattling pebbles, change for a moment into arcades as white as snow, then dissolve into a wilderness of foam. Thus to make the common things of life so many centres of thought, from which we can travel away to whole worlds of pleasant remembrance, lying calm perhaps in the golden light of lang syne, is one of the profoundest secrets of happiness, and one of the most useful habits we can cultivate.