Twenty years ago, between the loch’s edge and the links lay a field of shining yellow sand, to which the golden plover were wont to come down in great flocks of an autumn evening. Once the sand had established itself, the advance of grass and flowers began. Pushing forward a vanguard of reeds and rushes, they pursued their steady march down to the water’s edge; and now, where the sands were, is a grassy meadow, starred in its season with the pale blooms of the grass of Parnassus, its landward side meshed by rabbit tracks, the tiny rivulets winding through it beset with scented beds of wild peppermint and haunted by snipe, and its outer margin giving cover to duck and coots, to water-hens and dabchicks. There are little islets beyond the meadow, some grass-grown, some still of bare sand, and a little sandy beach at one place, where redshanks and ringed plover run in the shallows. Thither too come the dunlin and the sandpiper, and rarer birds—knots and ruffs, greenshanks with their triple call, and whimbrels, the “summer whaups” of the isles-folk. Here you may wade, knee-deep in clear water, to the very outer edge of the reeds and find all the way a footing on hard sand. And the reeds will yield their secrets. On this heaped pyramid the little grebe is hatching her eggs, and that reedy platform is a coot’s nest. Or at a later season you may chance, if the Fates be kind, to catch a glimpse of scurrying dusky ducklings vanishing among the green stems, while their mother flutters off, making-believe to have a broken wing. A wide, shallow ditch divides the marsh from the fields on the south, and where the ditch ends an old stone wall begins, marches a little way towards the water, and then breaks off to run round the bay of mud, and so up along the south shore of the loch. Where it turns off, this wall seems at one time to have meditated an advance into the water, and in its retreat has left a tumbled straggle of stones which runs out along a little cape. Here at twilight come great gray herons, shouting hoarsely, to sit gazing into the waters. Here, too, curlews are wont to gather, keeping well out of gunshot from wall or ditch. The southern bay—the bay of mud—holds a great reed-bed, where shelter many water-fowl. The swans breed there, with coot and water-hen and grebe. There, too, come the wild duck after their kind, mallard and teal, pochard and scaup, golden-eye and merganser. But the bottom there is muddy and treacherous, and it is a very doubtful pleasure to follow the wild-fowl through their haunts in the reeds. About the inner margin of the reed-bed, among the grassy tussocks and muddy pools, is a favourite feeding-ground for snipe. There, too, the pewits gather, and gulls of many kinds, while redshanks rise screaming from the water’s edge.