In returning to my hotel, I passed by another new church, with an uncommonly beautiful steeple and elaborate carvings.  I inquired its name; it was the new St. John’s, and was another of the buildings of the Free Church.

On Monday we made an excursion to the birthplace of Burns.  The railway between Glasgow and Ayr took us through Paisley, worthy of note as having produced our eminent ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, and along the banks of Castle Semple Loch, full of swans, a beautiful sheet of water, sleeping among green fields which shelve gently to its edge.  We passed by Irvine, where Burns learned the art of dressing flax, and traversing a sandy tract, close to the sea, were set down at Ayr, near the new bridge.  You recollect Burns’s dialogue between the “auld brig” of Ayr and the new, in which the former predicted that vain as her rival might be of her new and fresh appearance, the time would shortly come when she would be as much dilapidated as herself.  The prediction is fulfilled; the bridge has begun to give way, and workmen are busy in repairing its arches.

We followed a pleasant road, sometimes agreeably shaded by trees, to Alloway.  As we went out of Ayr we heard a great hammering and clicking of chisels, and looking to the right we saw workmen busy in building another of the Free Churches, with considerable elaborateness of architecture, in the early Norman style.  The day was very fine, the sun bright, and the sky above us perfectly clear; but, as is generally the case in this country with an east wind, the atmosphere was thick with a kind of dry haze which veils distant objects from the sight.  The sea was to our right, but we could not discern where it ended and the horizon began, and the mountains of the island of Arran and the lone and lofty rock of Ailsa Craig looked at first like faint shadows in the thick air, and were soon altogether undistinguishable.  We came at length to the little old painted kirk of Alloway, in the midst of a burying ground, roofless, but with gable-ends still standing, and its interior occupied by tombs.  A solid upright marble slab, before the church, marks the place where William Burns, the father of the poet, lies buried.  A little distance beyond flows the Doon under the old bridge crossed by Tam O’Shanter on the night of his adventure with the witches.

This little stream well deserves the epithet of “bonnie,” which Burns has given it.  Its clear but dark current, flows rapidly between banks often shaded with ashes, alders, and other trees, and sometimes overhung by precipices of a reddish-colored rock.  A little below the bridge it falls into the sea, but the tide comes not up to embitter its waters.  From the west bank of the stream the land rises to hills of considerable height, with a heathy summit and wooded slopes, called Brown Carrick Hill.  Two high cliffs near it impend over the sea, which are commonly called the Heads of Ayr, and not far from these stands a fragment of an ancient castle.