We moved down to the road opposite the new florid Gothic church of Alloway, where was a flight of steps, worn by the feet of thousands of pilgrims, leading over the wall to “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” In Burns’s day the edifice was whole and in use. All that is now left of the famous building are four bare walls, two of them gabled and one of them surmounted by a bell-cote. Burns’s progenitor is buried “where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” We were guided around by a most unprepossessing old native, a Dick Deadeye in appearance, who insisted that “preachers were of no use, except to scold the deil.” He made himself rather free in his conversation with and repartees made to the clerical gentlemen of the party, who were inclined to chaff this apparently self-appointed defender of His Satanic Majesty. The old Scotsman seemed, with his malevolent eye (not whole, if I remember aright), to be the very incarnation of the dogma of total depravity. By a sort of counter-irritant, his wit served but to stiffen up whatever “orthodoxy”--after studying the Bible, with and without the aid of the creeds--some of us had left. In any event, the cicerone “got as gude as he gie.” We glanced at the big monument of nine Corinthian fluted columns emblematic of the nine muses. With all due respect to the Greeks, but much less to the Scots, who reared the token, some of us wondered why such a true son of the soil as Burns could not have had for his memorial in architecture something more original than a Greek temple, for Scotland lacks neither brains nor taste. Here is said to be the Bible given by Burns to his Highland Mary, held in the hand of each at their last interview, while both promised eternal loyalty to each other. This “blessed damozel,” made immortal in the poem, was Mary Campbell, a dairy maid. Their last meeting was when, “standing one on each side of a small brook, they laved their hands in the stream, and holding a Bible between them, pronounced a vow of an eternal constancy.” The scene of the parting of the lovers is still pointed out. In returning from her visit of filial duty, Mary fell sick and died at Greenock. At Ellislan in 1789, on the third anniversary of the day on which Burns heard of her death, he wrote that loveliest of all his ballads, the address to “Mary in Heaven.” Since 1898, one may see her lofty statue reared in her native place, Dunoon, on Castle Hill, now famous for its seaside villas and as a summer resort, with Loch Eh, not far away. Thousands come, also, to see the proof that man worships woman.