O! Cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice? Presently our ears are assailed by the merry voices of children, and a troop of youngsters come struggling through a gap in the fence, laden with buttercups and daisies, and laughing and crowing with infantile delight, as they bear their floral treasures away. A few minutes brings us to the lodge entrance. Here the road forks, and passing through the gate we wind away towards the left, mounting the upper slopes as we advance. To the right the ground falls away, and in the hollow, between us and Elmer Hurst, a tiny rindle threads its way, after performing some little industrial service at the mill higher up. Across the green expanse there is a good sprinkling of trees, oaks and thorns, some of them aged, and wrinkled and weather-beaten enough to have borne the blasts of centuries; lime trees too are plentiful, sufficient to suggest the idea that they had given name to the place, did we not know that the true derivation was from the limes,--_i.e._, the limits or confines of the county. Eastwards the ground rises in hilly ridges, backed by great treeless wastes of moorland that rise and fall like the heaving billows of a tempestous sea suddenly arrested in their motion--a picture of bleak desolation, the dreariness of which is only relieved by a few patches of plantation, or a clump of storm-rent pines here and there dotting their heathy slopes. The green expanse before us lacks the fertility and richness of detail the southerner is accustomed to, and, when we remember that the park forms part of what was once the great forest of Macclesfield, we are apt to think that the forests of those days but ill accorded with our notions of what a forest should be.