For the visitor to Delamere Forest there is after all no scene more inspiring than is furnished by Eddisbury. Cuddington station will do for this, but the walk is rather too long; it is best to go direct to "Delamere," thence along the road a short distance, and so to the foot of the hill. In the time of the Heptarchy, it was an important stronghold. Rising to the height of five hundred and eighty-four feet above the sea, when in A.D. 914 that admirable lady, Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred, and widow of Ethelred, king of Mercia, sought to establish herself in positions of great strength, her feminine sagacity at once pointed to Eddisbury as impregnable. Ethelfleda, says the old chronicler, was "the wisest lady in England, an heroic princess; she might have been called a king rather than a lady or a queen. King Edward, her brother, governed his life, in his best actions, by her counsels." We have admirable women of our own living among us--women in every sense queenly by nature:--let us never forget, in our gratitude to God for the gift of them, that in the past there were prototypes of the best. Continued in her rule, by acclamation, after the death of her husband, Ethelfleda, "the lady of the Mercians," reigned for eight years. Rather more than eleven acres of the green mound we are now speaking of were defensively enclosed by her, partly with palings, partly with earthworks, traces of which remain to this day. Frail and perishable in its materials, the "city of Eddisbury," as historians call this once glorious though simple settlement, in the very nature of things could not last. A good river, essential to the prosperity of an inland town, it did not possess. After the death, moreover, of Ethelfleda, who went to her rest in 920, the subsidence of the Danish invasions reduced the importance of such fortresses, and so, by slow degrees, the famous old "city" disappeared. The name of Eddisbury occurs, it is true, in Domesday Book, but apparently as a name and nothing besides. Places like Eddisbury are to England what the sites of Nineveh and Palmyra are to the world. Standing upon their greensward, the memory of great things and greater people passes before the mind in long and animating procession. The once so great and powerful "Queen of the East," proud, chaste, literary Zenobia, was not nobler in her way than Saxon Ethelfleda. Thinking of her, pleasant it is to note how the little wild-flowers, the milk-wort and the eyebright, the unchanged heritors of the ground, are virtually just as she left them. Upon these, in such a spot, Time lays no "effacing finger." "States fall, arts fade, but Nature doth not die." Not without interest, either, is the fact that from the name of the people or kingdom she ruled so well, comes that of our chief local river. The Mersey was the dividing line between Mercia and Northumbria, and of the former it preserves memorable tradition. All the way up the stream till