tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been
elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the
prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer
which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.

Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here
have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first
a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by
trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impassable with mud, but always
driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap
of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less
than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little
different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like
the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the
sunlight on the dark, shining leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the
whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.

[Illustration: _Mickleham Church._]

Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking,
and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The
"swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole
disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written
accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into
the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham
to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to
explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in
seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when
there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford
Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened
to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the
Swallows, which, when I saw them, were brimming with very muddy water;
the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of
the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the _Worthies_:--

"I listen not to the country people telling it was experimented by a
goose, which was put in and came out again with _life_ (though
without feathers); but hearken seriously to those who judiciously
impute the _subsidency_ of the earth in the interstice aforesaid to
some underground hollowness made by that water in the passage
thereof."

The Swallows are really f