THE HALL, SLYFIELD HOUSE.
The road now winds pleasantly through the valley, but not within sight of the river until past the outlying houses of the little village of Fetcham. On gaining the point where the road from Great Bookham to Leatherhead falls into the one we are following, look out for an unassuming left-hand turning past the railway arch, leading in a hundred yards to Fetcham mill-pond. This is a lovely spot, where the wild-fowl congregate, and well worth halting at on a summer’s day, but tucked away so artfully that it will scarce be found save by asking. It is a long sheet of water, with reeds, and an island in the middle, and a peep back towards Leatherhead from the farther end, where the church tower peers above the trees. Flocks of moor-hens, a few couples of stately swans, and some domestic ducks form the invariable feathered company of the pond, and not infrequently the coot takes up his quarters here, with myriads of dabchicks; the great swans and little dabchicks, swimming together on the water, forming the oddest of contrasts: the swans like warships and the dabchicks like little black torpedo-boats.
Cycles can be walked along the path to the far end of the pond, where the road is reached again.
THE "RUNNING HORSE."
Leatherhead itself lies off to the left, less than half a mile distant, reached by a many-arched bridge straddling athwart the Mole, here a divergent and sedgy stream broken up by osier aits. On the other side of the bridge stands that crazy old inn, the “Running Horse,” claiming a continued existence since the fifteenth century and to have been the scene of the celebrated “tunning of Elynor Rummyng”; but, like the silk stocking so long and so often darned with worsted that no trace of the original material remained, the “Running Horse” has in all these six centuries been so repaired here and patched there that he would be a bold man who should dare swear to a fragment of that old house remaining.
ELYNOR RUMMYNG.