Nevertheless, after his Highland Mary, Burns had many spasms of affection, for he seems to have worshipped womanhood. One of his loves was a young girl, in whose honor he wrote a poem when she was about to leave for America, whither she went and married, rearing a family of sons who became famous in science. One of her descendants settled at Ithaca, New York, to live by the side of our beautiful Lake Cayuga. It is after him that Port Renwick on its shores is named. In a grotto, at the end of the garden, are the figures of Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnnie. Except for the natural beauty of the spot in the Doon Valley, the country seems very monotonous and uninteresting, though the two bridges are worth attention. One, “the auld bridge,” has a single slim arch, which Meg tried to gain when she fled from the witches. Here flows the river Doon, to which the writings of Burns have given such celebrity. It rises in a lake of the same name, about eight miles in length, and the river has a seaward course of eighteen miles, its banks, especially in summer time, being laden with floral richness and beauty. Besides looking so small to one used to the Hudson, Susquehanna, and Delaware, it seemed almost lost in trees and shrubbery. Yet in some parts its rocky banks are imposing. [Illustration: THE TAM O’ SHANTER INN, AYR] There is also a statue of Robert Burns, between whom and Americans there will ever be an indissoluble bond of sympathy. For, apart from his wonderful work in liberating Scottish poetry from the bonds of classical moulds and traditions, he had that profound sympathy with man as man, which enabled him to see into the real meaning of the French Revolution and its effect on the whole world. Though not blind to its horrors and mistakes, he saw far more clearly its ultimate results and blessings to mankind than could the men then in power and office in England. These, in 1790, were too much like their successors of 1861, when the struggle between slavery and freedom set armies in shock. Then the British leaders of public opinion, the proprietors of the Lancashire cotton mills, “Punch,” the London “Times,” and even the great poets uttered no voice of appreciation of Lincoln or of the freedom-loving American masses, not only of the North, but in the highlands of the South. Burns not only taught in verse the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, but in his famous lines made forecast of the United States of the world, which our descendants are to see.