“When Skelton wore the laurel crown
My ale put all the alewives down.”
To do that, you would think, it must needs have been both good and cheap. Certainly, if the portrait-sign of Elynor be anything like her, customers did not resort to the “Running Horse” to bask in her smiles, for she is represented as a very plain, not to say ugly, old lady with a predatory nose plentifully studded with warts.
Leatherhead is a still unspoiled little town, beside its “mousling Mole,” as Drayton calls that river. “Mousling,” probably because of the holes, or “swallows,” as they are called, into which this curious river every now and again disappears, like a mouse, as the poet prettily expresses it.
SIGN OF THE "RUNNING HORSE."