XII 

 GOLF LINKS AND WILD LIFE 



A MORN ING dawns afresh from the 

 past. Children went out ere the dew 

 was off the grass, the girls slender 

 basket in hand to gather nuts, the 

 boys to show their prowess, by leaping from the 

 turf into the sandy and half-weird depths of 

 "Corbie's hole." The dew lies on the memory 

 of that morning. 



It was a stretch of bent-covered blown sand, 

 somewhat north of the Forth and south of the 

 Tay. Fife, as all the world knows, is a penin- 

 sula, with more of sea coast than any other 

 county on the east of Scotland, and for that 

 reason is a paradise of links. It is the olden 

 golfing land when golf was young, to which all 

 the new-sprung links look back as children to 

 their home, as colonists to their native country. 

 Golf was younger then. 



Wind-spun dunes rose rank within rank ; the 

 outer and younger facing the sea, the older and 

 inner rolling and softening, as waves soften into 

 ripples and lose themselves on the shore. Here 



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