But listen to this mighty beating of the waters, and look yonder! From the shadow of the hazels on the loch’s margin comes the royal bird of Juno, pursuing his mate. In his eager haste he has left the water, and with outstretched neck, beating air and loch into foam with his silver wings, he rushes after her. She, with the tantalising coyness of her sex, has also risen from the water, and, streaming across the loch, keeps undiminished the distance between herself and her pursuer. At this, finding his efforts vain, he gives up the chase, subsiding upon the surface with a force which sends the foam-waves curling high about his breast. Disdainfully he turns his back upon the fair, and, without once inclining his proud black beak in her direction, makes steadily for the shore. This, however, does not please the lady. She turns, looks after her inconstant lover, and, meeting with no response, begins slowly to sail in his direction. Suddenly again at this, with snowy pinions erect, neck curved gallantly back, and the calm waters foaming round his breast, he surges after her, ploughing up the loch into shining furrows. Again the coy dame flees, again and again the same amorous manœuvres are gone through, and when night itself falls, the splendid birds will still be dallying over their long-certain courtship. No plebeian affair is the mating of these imperial denizens of the loch. Seldom do mortals witness even this wooing of the swans.
More commonplace, though not, perhaps, less happy, are the three brown ducks and their attentive drake, which having, one after another, splashed themselves methodically on the flat stone by the margin of the loch, now swim off in a string for home. Young trout are making silver circles in the water as they leap at flies under the grassy bank; and the keen-winged little swallows that skim the surface, sometimes tip the glassy wave with foot or wing.
Before the daylight fades there are beautiful colours to be seen on shore. The fresh young reeds that rise at hand like a green mist out of the water deepen to a purple tint nearer the margin. The march dyke that comes down to the shallows is covered with the red chain-mail of a small-leaved ivy; and the gean-tree beside it, that a week or two ago raised into the blue sky creamy coral-branches of blossom, still retains something of its fragile loveliness. On the stony meadow beyond, the golden whinflower is fading now, but is being replaced by the paler yellow splendour of the broom. The rich blush-purple of some heathy banks betrays the delicate blossom of the blaeberry, and patches of brown show where the young bracken are uncurling their rusty tips.