Before the opening of the "Manchester and Birmingham"--a title now forgotten, the line having been absorbed into the London and North-Western--the road through Rusholme, Didsbury, and Cheadle was the accustomed highway to Congleton, _viâ_ Wilmslow, to which latter place the hand still points at certain corners within a mile or two of All Saints' Church. The Cheadle people occasionally made use of it for pic-nic carriage parties to a fir-crowned steep just beyond Chorley, a wilderness scarcely inhabited, and, save for its checking the speed of travellers from Knutsford to Macclesfield, scarcely recognized in the local geography. How vast the revolution promoted in 1842! The wilderness soon became decked with mansions and gardens; it blossomed as the rose; and "Alderley Edge" is now little less than a suburb of Manchester. The old carriage-way being superseded by the rail, and much that is delightful being reached by train long before getting to Alderley, we will now accordingly make new departure for fair Cheshire by way of Stockport. Arrived at Wilmslow the old-fashioned, the Bollin reappears, this particular point being in truth the head of the valley through which the stream, as before-mentioned, pursues its sinuous and rapid course to Ashley. The country upon the right is full of quiet lanes and pretty meadows, none of which are more pleasing than those containing the path to the margin of Norcliffe. If permission can be obtained to visit the glen _ipsissima_, they are like the vestibule of a temple. Norcliffe was laid out in 1830 by the late Mr. R. H. Greg. Selecting everything that he planted with consummate taste and judgment, the slopes are rich with trees which in point of value and variety have no equal in this part of England. Beautiful from the first, the scene at the present moment is more charming than ever before; for tree-planting is one of those essentially noble and generous works the glory of which a man can rarely expect to see unfolded in his own life-time:--like a great poem, it reaches afar, and covers the generations that succeed. The very striking feature of Norcliffe, the main and characteristic one, consists in the profusion of the Conifers. The pine, the fir, the cedar, in their many and always princely forms, are represented in this delicious spot by upwards of forty species and varieties, many of them having very numerous examples, all presenting, in the best manner, the symmetrical outlines so remarkable in coniferous trees, and holding positions with regard to their immediate neighbours such as awaken the most agreeable ideas of harmony. There is no taller Deodara in the neighbourhood than one of the specimens near the lawn, nor is there anywhere in this neighbourhood a more comely Norway spruce, the top already seventy feet above the turf, and covered annually with cones, which the squirrels are glad of, the spring never finding one that the little creatures have overlooked.