Here spring perpetual leads the laughing hours, And winter wears a wreath of summer flowers.
_Viâ_ Northen is the pleasantest route to the beautiful district of which the centre is Wythenshawe Hall, a remarkably fine building of the time of James the First, and at present the seat of Mr. Thomas Wm. Tatton. It is approached through a piece of ground called the "Saxfield," upon which tradition says there was once a terrible fight between Saxons and Danes; old maps mark the place with crossed swords. We have not much of historical interest pertaining to the neighbourhood of Manchester, but what there is seems to concentrate about Northen. The Pretender, Prince Charles Edward, crossed the river in 1745, at a place not very far below Cheadle Bridge, and it is curious that the Prince Consort's visit, in 1857, when he came to open the Art-Treasures Exhibition at Old Trafford, should have been made by way of the very bridge alluded to. In 1644 Wythenshawe was besieged by a party of Cromwell's soldiers, who planted a battery on the side overlooking Northen, and threw many cannon-shots against the house. During some alterations in the garden a few years since, and the conversion of a pond-bottom into flower-beds, several of the balls were found; and another, which entered by the drawing-room window, and smashed the wood-carving on the opposite wall, is shown to visitors privileged to view this beautiful hall. The carving was not replaced, so that the blank space preserves a distinct memorial of the attack. The siege was conducted by the celebrated Colonel Robert Dukenfield, the most conspicuous soldier, after Sir William Brereton, in the Cheshire history of the Civil War. It occupied some time, and was only brought to a close by getting two pieces of ordnance from Manchester, the same probably from which the balls above alluded to were discharged. During its progress, one of the maid-servants inside, for her amusement, took aim with a musket at an officer of the Parliamentary forces, who was carelessly lounging about, and managed to kill him. He is supposed to have been the "Captayne Adams," stated in the Stockport register of burials to have been "slayne at Withenshawe, on Sunday, the 25th." In the course of alterations in the grounds during the last century, six skeletons were discovered. They were lying close together, and are reasonably supposed to have been those of soldiers who perished during the siege. Cromwell afterwards stayed at the hall, and slept in a room still called, from his occupation of it, "Oliver Cromwell's room." The bed, which is dated 1619, is of elegantly carved wood, the furniture and mirrors matching it, and of the same age. The wood-carving at Lyme Hall is usually considered to show the best local work of the period, but that at Wythenshawe, in the opinion of many, is still finer. The gardens surrounding the hall are full of curious trees, many of them remarkably good and shapely specimens, especially an _Arbor vitæ_, consisting of a tall green pyramid, surrounded by minarets, like a spire with pinnacles round the base, and exquisitely beautiful when swayed slopingly by the wind. In 1858 there sprang up in a piece of newly-turned land at the back of the hall, many hundreds of the _Rumex sanguineus_, its large oval light-green leaves traced and pencilled in every direction with the richest crimson. The ordinary green-juiced form of the plant is common enough, but the crimson-juiced is one of the rarities of our Flora.