On the Cotterill side of Mobberley, or Alderley way, the country resembles that in the vicinity of Castle Mill, consisting of gentle slopes and promontories, often wooded, and at every turn presenting some new and agreeable feature. The little dells and cloughs, each with its stream of clear water scampering away to the Bollin, are delicious. The botany of Cotterill is also recapitulated in its best features; mosses of the choicest kinds grow in profusion on every bank,--_Hypna_, with large green feathery branches, like ferns in miniature; _Jungermannias_ also; and the noblest plants of the hart's-tongue fern that occur in the district. One of the dells positively overflows with it, excepting, that is, where the ground is not pre-occupied by the prickly shield-fern. Burleyhurst Wood, close by, contains abundance of the pretty green-flowered true-love, _Paris quadrifolia_, more properly _trulove_, the name referring not to the sentiment itself, but to the famous old four-fold symbol of engagement which in heraldry reappears in "quartering." All the spring flowers open here with the first steps of the renewed season; and most inspiring is it, at a time when on the north side of the town there is nothing to be seen but an early coltsfoot, to find one's self greeted in these sweet and perennially green woods, by the primrose, the anemone, the butter-bur, and the golden saxifrage,--and not as single couriers, but plentiful as the delight they give, mingling with the great ferns bequeathed by the autumn, as travellers tell us palms and fir-trees intermix on tropical mountains, while the _Marchantia_ adds another charm in its curious cones, and the smooth round cups of the _Peziza_ glow like so many vases of deepest carnelian. In the aspect of vegetation in early spring, as it discloses itself at Mobberley and at equal distance north of the town, there is the difference of a full month. Such at least was the case in 1858, the year in which these lines were written. There is no occasion to return to Ashley by the same path. Mobberley station is scarcely more than a mile from the village, and of course would be preferred when the object is to reach the latter promptly.