rediction 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. 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 fee