the accustomed habitat of the wood-anemone has since been observed at Cheadle and at Alderley. No slight pleasure is it in connection with botany that plants and events thus link themselves together, recalling whole days of tranquil happiness spent with valued friends in the green fields. Associations with trees and flowers seem almost inevitably pleasant and graceful ones; at all events, we never hear of the reverse. When orators and poets want objects for elegant simile and comparison, they find trees and flowers supply them most readily; and, on the other hand, how rarely are these beautiful productions of nature used for the illustration of what is vicious and degrading, or in any way mixed up with what is vile and disgraceful. Trees and flowers lead us, by virtue of their kindly influences on the heart and the imagination, to a disrelish and forgetfulness of the uncomely, and to think better of everything around us; so that a walk in the fields, over and above its invigorating and refreshing value, acts as a kindly little preacher, and shows us that we may at all events read, if not _Honi soit qui mal y pense_, write, In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue, and white. The lapse of twenty-four years has not tended to improve the aspect of the Reddish valley. The main features are the same, but the brightness is sadly dimmed. Everything now, in 1882, illustrates the operation of town smoke and hurtful vapours, not to mention the devastating influences which come of human travel. The wild-flowers have shared the fate of those in other suburban localities; the old hall has sunk further towards decay; the Inghams, happily, are extant. Mr. Sidebotham, for his own part, practices, amid the refinements of his Bowdon home, all that he cultivated originally upon the banks of the little river, and with the added success that arises upon unbroken assiduity. He tells me now of his researches into the entomology of Dunham Park, where not long ago, for one or two successive seasons, in July, a curious beetle occurred in plenty, a fact immensely remarkable, since only one other of its kind has ever been noticed elsewhere in England, this upon an oak in Windsor Forest as far back as 1829! The insect was first detected by Mr. Joseph Chappell, a working mechanic at Sir Joseph Whitworth's, and one of the most careful observers of nature now in our midst. * * * * * The first photographs ever shown in Manchester were laid before a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society by the late Mr. J. E. Bowman, in November, 1838. I remember the occasion well, and the interest taken in them by Dr. Dalton. [Illustration] [16: At which last-named place there is now also (1882) a railway station.] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. ALONG THE MACCLESFIELD LINE.