"White Moss," as before-mentioned (p. 60), has long since been converted into farm-land, but in the days referred to was still in its glory, dull to look at, no doubt, but to the interrogator a local garden of Eden. Never shall we forget the genial smile that rippled old George Crozier's broad, round, rosy, white-fringed face as one sunny afternoon in Whitsun-week, 1839, we stepped with twenty or more under his guidance for the first time upon the elastic peat, and beheld the andromeda and the pink stars of the cranberry, these also for the first time. To Crozier the pretty flowers were familiar as the hills; his joy was to watch the delight they gave the juveniles. Presently a man came up and asked if we were "looking for _brids_." A little puzzled at first by the strange inquiry, the mystery was soon solved by his taking off his hat and showing it stuck full of butterflies, the "birds," or in his homely Anglo-Saxon, the "brids" caught during his ramble. Among the more remarkable insects then to be captured on White Moss were the showy beetle called _Carabus nitens_, the glittering green stripes of its wing-cases edged with a band of brilliant copper-colour; the fox-moth, _Lasiocampa rubi_, so called from its peculiar foxy colour; and the emperor-moth, _Saturnia pavonia_, for which the moss had been from time immemorial a noted locality. Great has been the sport of many an entomologist, as, sitting on White Moss on a fine day in early summer, with a captured virgin female of this beautiful creature, the _antennæ_ of which are like ostrich plumes, the males have flocked to him, or rather to _her_, by the hundred, for the virgin female of the emperor-moth, though she can fly, prefers to sit still until she has been visited by an individual of the other sex. Up to this period she exudes a delicate odour which attracts the latter from long distances, those which have far to come, and arrive late, or not till after the advent of the first, turning back, unless captured by the entomologist's net, as soon as they perceive by their wonderful instinct that she is virgin no longer. 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.