Old Mole is a story by Gilbert Cannan. Cannan was a British dramatist, translator and novelist. Excerpt: "He was called Old Mole because whenever he spied a boy cribbing, or larking, or reading a book that had no reference to the subject in hand, or eating sweets, or passing notes, he would cry out in a voice of thunder: "Ha! Art thou there, old mole?" Thrigsbian fathers who had suffered at his hands would ask their sons about Old Mole, and so his position was fortified by a sort of veneration. He [Pg 4]was one of those men who assume their definite shape and appearance in the early thirties, and thereafter give no clew to their age even to the most curious spinster's inquisitiveness."