the street-corners
of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road
underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part water; and any
one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with "A fine thowe" (thaw).
My way lay among rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and
dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking village of
Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice save that Burns came there to
study surveying in the summer of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard,
the original of Tam o' Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It is worth
noticing, however, that this was the first place I thought
"Highland-looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to
the coast. As I came down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed
strangely different from the day before. The cold fogs were all blown
away; and there was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and
deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain tops
of Arran, veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low,
blue land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. The sea was
bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down the Firth,
lay over at different angles in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing
lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and whinnied as if
the spring were in him.

The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sandhills
and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages
stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd feature, not easy to
describe in words: a triangular porch projected from above the door,
supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was
hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real
entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make
himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish
a pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device: for, as the
post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So far as I am
aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about Girvan. And
that corner is noticeable for more reasons: it is certainly one of the
most characteristic districts in Scotland. It has this movable porch by
way of architecture; it has, as