The preface to the original work of 1858 contained the following passages:--"No grown-up person who has resided in Manchester even twenty years, is unacquainted with the mighty changes that have passed over its suburbs during that period; while those who have lived here thirty, forty, and fifty years tell us of circumstances and conditions almost incredible. Neighbourhoods once familiar as delightful rural solitudes, are now covered with houses, and densely crowded with population; the pleasant field-paths we trod in our youth have disappeared, and in their stead are long lines of pavement, lighted with gas, and paced by the policeman. In a few years it is not improbable that places described in the following pages as rustic and sylvan will have shared the same fate, and be as purely historical as Garratt Wood and Ordsall Clough. The Botany of the district will to a certain extent be similarly affected. No longer than fifteen years ago (_i.e._ in 1840) the fields by St. George's Church, in the Chester Road, were blue every March and April with the spring crocus, and on the very spot where Platt Church now lifts its tall and graceful spire, there was a large pond filled with the _Stratiotes_, or water-aloe. If the past be a prognostic of the future, it is easy to guess what will happen to other things, and to understand how in half a century hence our present 'Walks' will have become as obsolete as their author, and the entire subject require a new and livelier treatment. A descriptive history of the suburbs of Manchester as they were fifty years ago, would be a most interesting and valuable item of our local literature. It would be as curious to the lover of bygones as this book of to-day may perhaps appear to the Manchester people of A.D. 1900. How extraordinary would be the facts may be judged from the following extracts from De Quincey, whose youth, it is well known, was passed in the neighbourhood of Manchester. Mark first what he says of the _place_ he lived in. 'And if, after the manner of the Emperor Aurelius, I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special consideration,--that I lived in a _rustic solitude_; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters; and finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, and holy, and magnificent church.' And now mark where lay this 'rustic solitude.' He is describing the expected return of his father:--'It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants and four of us children were gathered for hours on the lawn before the house, listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came, nine, ten, eleven o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed without a warning sound, for Greenhay, being so _solitary a house_, formed a "terminus ad quem," beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages,