I have sometimes wondered that born as Burns was in the neighborhood of the sea, which I was told is often swelled into prodigious waves by the strong west winds that beat on this coast, he should yet have taken little if any of his poetic imagery from the ocean, either in its wilder or its gentler moods.  But his occupations were among the fields, and his thoughts were of those who dwelt among them, and his imagination never wandered where his feelings went not.

The monument erected to Burns, near the bridge, is an ostentatious thing, with a gilt tripod on its summit.  I was only interested to see some of the relics of Burns which it contains, among which is the Bible given by him to his Highland Mary.  A road from the monument leads along the stream among the trees to a mill, at a little distance above the bridge, where the water passes under steep rocks, and I followed it.  The wild rose and the woodbine were in full bloom in the hedges, and these to me were a better memorial of Burns than any thing which the chisel could execute.  A barefoot lassie came down the grassy bank among the trees with a pail, and after washing her feet in the swift current filled the pail and bore it again over the bank.

We saw many visitors sauntering about the bridge or entering the monument; some of them seemed to be country people,—­young men with their sisters and sweethearts, and others in white cravats with a certain sleekness of appearance I took to be of the profession of divinity.  At the inn beside the Doon, a young woman, with a face and head so round as almost to form a perfect globe, gave us a dish of excellent strawberries and cream, and we set off for the house in which Burns was born.

It is a clay-built cottage of the humblest class, and now serves, with the addition of two new rooms of a better architecture, for an ale-house.  Mrs. Hastings, the landlady, showed us the register, in which we remarked that a very great number of the visitors had taken the pains to write themselves down as shoemakers.  Major Burns, one of the sons of the poet, had lately visited the place with his two daughters and a younger brother, and they had inscribed their names in the book.

We returned to Ayr by a different road from that by which we went to Alloway.  The haymakers were at work in the fields, and the vegetation was everywhere in its highest luxuriance.  You may smile at the idea, but I affirm that a potato field in Great Britain, at this season, is a prettier sight than a vineyard in Italy.  In this climate, the plant throws out an abundance of blossoms, pink and white, and just now the potato fields are as fine as so many flower gardens.

We crossed the old bridge of Ayr, which is yet in good preservation, though carriages are not allowed to pass over it.  Looking up the stream, we saw solitary slopes and groves on its left bank, and I fancied that I had in my eye the sequestered spot on the banks of the Ayr, where Burns and his Highland Mary held the meeting described in his letters, and parted to meet no more.