Along the northern shore, as close as may be to the water, runs another road—a road that leads to the kirk and the kirkyaird, and, incidentally, to the laird’s house. Yet because men, who made the road, must preserve an apparent sobriety and straightness of purpose, while Nature, who laid the line between land and water, need care nothing for her reputation, there runs between the road and the water a grassy margin. Here it is of the narrowest, and there it spreads out into miniature capes and peninsulas, where teal love to rest in the early morning, and rabbits come down to nibble the juicy water-plants long before man is afoot. [Illustration: _Some “Big Hooses.”—I._ 1. Skaill, Sandwick. 2. Binscarth. 3. Hall of Tankerness. 4. Westness, Rousay. 5. Holodyke, Harray.] On the other side of the road the sandbank rises steep and green, a cliff of sandy sward sometimes attaining a height of full twenty feet. There the rabbits have their outposts. The green turf is splotched with the scattered sand from their burrows, and their white tails bob and flutter among the mounds they have made. This is but the flank of the sandhill. Farther to the west, where man has never ploughed the sand, the loch is bounded by low, green links which swarm with rabbits. Bunkers and hazards there are to delight the soul of the golfer; yet hither that lover of links comes but seldom. The rabbits and the birds have it all to themselves, save where some little fields are set amid the links, and one or two houses of men. Out of the turf of the bank projects a great stone, gray with lichen, and looking like the broken and petrified shaft of a mighty spear flung by one of the giants who of old waged a titanic warfare from isle to isle. Yet if a vague legend be true, the great stone is rather some bewitched living creature waiting the breaking of spells; for, so they say, there is a certain night in each year when it leaves its sandy bed and goes down to quench its thirst in the waters of the loch. Yet the birds do not fear it. The wheatear jerks and bobs upon its topmost edge as we gaze and wonder how and when he came hither. Then with a flirt of his tail he is off to repeat his cheerful, tuneless call upon the nearest mound. At its western end the loch widens and is divided into two little bays, a bay of sand and a bay of mud. In the more northerly of these bays there is being fought a long skirmish in the great, slow, endless war between land and water; and now victory leans towards the land, for the sand, blowing up day by day from the sea, settles here in the shallow water and drives it back.