A little beyond Stoke D'Abernon Church, one of these roads crosses the river, presently on its banks coming by another of Surrey's antiquities, Slyfield manor-house, now a farm, notable for its carved staircase and fine ceilings and panelling. The road goes on southwards, swerving east over Great Bookham Common for Leatherhead. The Mole for its part makes another provoking loop to the north. I have nothing to say against the road, a very pleasant one as roads go. But the pedestrian may now take a _via media_ across country by turning down the left bank of the river beside Slyfield, and presently bearing off right across fields, on a mounting path that leads pretty straight into a lane, growing into a road before it passes under the Leatherhead-Guildford line, which points straight to Leatherhead. From the road bending in this direction, one can gain the town along the bank of a mill-pond that might claim rank as a lake; or holding on to the embankment of the Brighton line, one there finds a path leading by a cricket-field up the course of the Mole. But it would be a pity not to turn aside into the ancient town of Leatherhead, displayed in full to wayfarers from Epsom to Guildford, its chief thoroughfare guiding them to the bridge at which stands the old "Running Horse." This is taken to be the very tavern which Skelton, Henry VIII.'s learned tutor and doggerel poet, hoarsely sang of as keeping an open door-- To travellers, to tinkers, To sweaters, to swinkers, And all good ale drinkers. But Skelton's hostess is more than once said to dwell "on a hill" beside Leatherhead, and so to describe the riverside situation of this house seems a license not to be granted even by poetic sessions. A little way down the stream the cyclist might wash off his dust in a mill turned into a quaint swimming-bath. Leatherhead has fewer signs of antiquity than of prosperity, surrounded as it is by large houses, one of them St. John's School for the sons of the clergy, a former headmaster of which had a son of his own known to novel readers as "Anthony Hope." The two stations are close together on the east side of the town, where a path leads down the bank of the Mole. On the other side is the Church, a mainly fourteenth-century one, with some noticeable coloured glass, lying beneath the yew-dappled slopes of Leatherhead Downs, which we shall presently come to by the Roman Road across them.