The second river of Surrey is the Mole, a more untamed stream than the Wey, not harnessed to any occupation unless angling and pleasure-boating by stretches, or here and there the turning of a mill. The name has been taken for a little joke of our ancestors, as denoting the way in which at one part of its course this river tries a trick of burrowing in hot seasons-- That, like a nousling Mole, doth make His way still underground, till Thames he overtake. But it seems doubtful whether the name of this retiring animal be as old in English as that of Molesey, the Mole island, where the river enters the Thames at what is now rather a chain of shady islands, a noted port of pleasure-boats; and the name Tagg, that has taken such banyan-like root here, seems also to have a smack of Saxon origin. The Emlyn is the Mole's old _alias_, which has been connected with a Celtic word for "mill"; and when we compare the Latin _Mola_ and _Molina_ a more probable origin of the name may be suggested. But such a derivation also is scouted by one of the chief pundits of English etymology, who guesses rather that "Mole has been manufactured by backward inferences out of Molesey, and that this contains the genitive of a personal name"--perhaps some Tagg of primitive days. To its obscure name poets have added such epithets as the "sullen" Mole, the "soft and gentle" Mole, and the "silent" Mole. The "sulky" Mole sometimes suggests itself; and the "wild" Mole would be not out of place in flood time. In its upper course it has ripples and rushes; and as it pushes through the chalk it may give itself up to the freaks of its "swallows"; but in general this "wanton nymph" takes a rather tame career on a flat arena, showing its friskiness chiefly by curving turns, or by cascades too neat to be natural; often, too, it varies its mood between weedy shallows and curdling pools; now it seems to sleep under a crumbling meadow bank; now it tries a run beneath a wooded slope, or steals out of a vault of trees to be half-buried in "weeds of glorious [Illustration: WATER LANE, NEAR EAST HORSLEY.] feature"; then at last it creeps slowly over the Thames plain, like an idle scholar who knows what tasks await the end of its holiday independence. In the final mile or two it makes an attempt at a delta of two branches, that to the right styled the Ember river.