Here the country ends suddenly, as though it were shorn off in a clean cut. Looking backwards, through the railway bridge, there is the sunny road; in front, in the direction of Manchester, is the greyer atmosphere of town. One might easily imagine that bridge to be the veritable doorway into Manchester and its congeries of satellite towns; or, coming from Manchester, the entrance into the region of rural things. There, through the archway, is Poynton, as yet rustic, with birds singing on the hedgerow spray: here the costermonger is crying his wares, and you encounter the terminus of a series of electric tramways that lead with little intermission as far as Bolton. And in between there is an ever-deepening gloom, a continuously increasing racket of traffic on the terrible granite setts that Manchester affects; a growing throng of anxiously hurrying people, units in that wonderful, and to some minds no less terrible than wonderful, assemblage of four millions of human beings who inhabit these next few miles. The name of Hazel Grove is as poetic as that of the village of “Falling Water” Rip Van Winkle knew before he went off in his long twenty years’ sleep. When he awoke, you will remember, he found it become a very different place, and renamed “Washington.” But the reverse process has taken place here. In the old days this was merely “Bullock Smithy,” into which you cannot read poetry, epic or pastoral. Bullock Smithy was just a wayside forge which is said to have taken its name from the cattle-drovers bringing their steers to be shod here, on the long journey down the road. They may have done, and probably did so; but the name really originated in 1560, when the smithy, even then existing, was bequeathed to the smith, Richard Bullock, of Torkington, by “John de Torkinton.” [Illustration: THE “VILLAGE OF HAZEL GROVE.”] The place by degrees became a little settlement of residences built by Manchester men who loved the country, and some of these country houses may even yet be seen in the long street, looking very much out of place amid their new neighbours: notably a large stuccoed house with a tablet bearing the date 1761, and the initials H. J. M. “Bullock Smithy” then no longer served. The name was too redolent of cattle-drovers, and so “Hazel Grove” was invented. On the front of the great white-faced “Red Lion” inn may be seen carved the legend, “Village of Hazel Grove, 1796,” but this does not appear to have been cut until 1836, and the old road-books go on calling the place by its older name until coaching and Cary were both snuffed out. Some pathetic relics of a bygone day still remain, chiefly in the names of houses and side-streets. But “Cherry Tree Lane” nowadays contains no cherry-trees, and no Jargonels or Bons Chrétiens grow in the garden of “Pear Tree Cottage.”