The wings of the males, as with most other kinds of butterfly, are rarely found perfect, except when first fledged. Flying about in ardent search of the female, they tear and chip them against the heath and other plants with which they come in contact through their impatience. The plant that chiefly attracted attention on that memorable day was the cotton-sedge, the most beautiful production of the moorlands, and conspicuous from afar as its silvery-white tassels bend and recover before the breeze. Carrying off a great handful, "Look!" said the rural children in the lanes, amazed that any one could care for such rubbish, "there's a man been getting moss-crops!" All the mosses about Manchester produce the cotton-sedge, but never have we seen such luxuriant specimens as in the ditches that were then being cut for the draining of White Moss. Three species occur, the broad-leaved, the narrow-leaved, and the single-flowered, the tufts of the latter being upright instead of pendulous. Their beauty, unhappily, is their only recommendation, for the herbage is rough and coarse, and altogether unfit for pasture, and the cotton, so called, is cotton only in name. It cannot be manufactured; the hairs are too straight and too brittle. Instead of twining and entangling, like the filaments of true cotton, they lie rigidly side by side, resembling true cotton merely in their whiteness, and could no more be spun into yarn than slate-pencils could be twisted into a cable. Boggart-hole Clough, a little nearer Manchester, was reached most readily at the time spoken of, and of course is so still, by way of Oldham Road, going by omnibus or tram-car as far as the end of the first lane carried over the railway. There are plenty of roads _under_ arches formed by the railway, but these will not do; it must be the first that goes _over_ the embankment. Crossing the line at the point in question, a descending path presently brings us to Jack's Bridge, a sweet little dell, consecrated by one of nature's own poets, then a resident at Newton Heath: Jack's Bridge! thy road is rough, But thy wild-flowers are sweet!