At The Close Of The Exercises, He Announced That A
Third Service Would Be Held In The Evening.
"The subject," continued he,
"will be the thoughts and exercises of Jonah in the whale's belly."
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.
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