In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe. I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in Manchester, as a stranger, with no friends in the great city, and with that dim sense of locality only a railway journey can give. Coming by road into any such place, you bring topographical continuity with you, and know where the grim houses end and the smiling country begins; but to be set down solitary in midst of these miles of streets, and then on some leisure day to essay the enterprise of walking out to where the last house fronts upon the fields, and to walk on and on, and never seem to come any nearer the fringe of the frowning houses, is an experience whose horror only De Quincey could hope to portray. London is larger, but its streets have a more varied interest. Here, away from the midst of Manchester, whose central architecture is ornate, if black, the mean, featureless streets sear your very soul. It was before the days of electric tramways, and I walked on and on, and still on, without coming to the end of Manchester, and then at Old Trafford, obsessed with a dread of it all, walked back; thinking, rather wildly, did it ever come to an end. Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and onwards, ever winding, for miles, and always, although extraordinarily lonely, and with never a house nor a wayfarer, paved with granite setts which it must have cost a considerable fortune to lay there. It began in the neighbourhood of Warburton and ended at a misbegotten place called Broad Heath, and still it was more than six and a half miles to Manchester. I was never before so genuinely astonished in all my life.