No frost ever sets ice on the millpond, it is said, and in hard winters wildfowl flock to it. I never have seen on the water any fowl that were wild, but it is crowded with swimming and diving birds. You can count thirty or forty coots, besides moorhens and a dozen dabchicks or so, and at the end where the mill stands there are fat duck and a bevy of swans. It is an arresting picture, the long, clear surface, the coots with their white foreheads dabbling in the weeds or rushing after one another with loud splashings, the dabchicks diving six at a time out of sight, and the dignified swans breasting the flowing water under the red brick and lichens of the mill. The coots, unlike all other coots, too, actually swim up to be fed. There is a strong spell of magic over all that strange pool. Some naiad Circe combs her hair far below the weeds, and has bewitched the wildfowl and the green cold water. [Illustration: _Ye Olde Running Horse Inn, Leatherhead._] It would be easy to believe that the rushing springs of the millpond were in reality the Mole reappearing from her dive below ground at Mickleham, higher up the stream. But if that is so, the river must pass through some kind of filter, for it can be thick and cloudy at Mickleham, but is never anything but clean and pure at the mill. The mill stream joins the Mole just below Leatherhead Bridge, a fine span of fourteen arches. The Mole can put on many faces, but I think she is nowhere in all her journey more fascinating than where she divides her stream under Leatherhead, and comes dancing down by separate channels to her broad sheet of ripples at the bridge. Beyond the bridge on the left, is the site of a very famous old inn. The present inn, the Running Horse, has been partly rebuilt, and has few external attractions, but the mistress of the old inn, four hundred years ago, was the subject of an ode written by the Poet Laureate. She was Elinour Rumming, ale-wife of a cabaret at "Lederhede in Sothray," and John Skelton, perhaps to amuse Henry VIII, and perhaps to please himself, wrote one of his pungent, tumbling romps of doggerel about her. "The Tunning of Elinour Rumming, per Skelton Laureate," as one of the old editions prints it, is an interminable piece of rhyme, mostly an orgy of coarseness, but with a certain rude vigour of humour and live truth. Here are a score of lines out of some hundreds:-- THE TUNNYNG OF ELINOUR RUMMING, PER SKELTON LAUREATE. "Tell you I chill If that ye wyll A while be still Of a comelye gyll That dwelt on a hyll But she is not gryll For she is somewhat sage And well worne in age For her visage It would asswage A mannes courage.