sely, to be moving--a most uncanny motion. The water wells up
incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some
unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to
find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a
policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones,
which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a
puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening
ripple. Then you watch the stone sinking down slowly against the up-rush
of water, but distinct and white and wavering. Then another ripple--a
mere ring of light, in some way mirroring the real ripple of the
surface--leaps out apparently from the side of the pool a foot or so
under water, touches the white, wavering stone, and the stone vanishes.
There is no stirring of mud, as there would be if it struck the bottom
of an ordinary pond; it merely disappears into an invisible mouth in the
green.

[Illustration: _Leatherhead._]

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
nowhe