The rivers of Ayrshire have a corner by themselves in the heart of the Scot, and in the memory of the world. "Bonnie Doon" and "auld hermit Ayr" are better known and more extolled on the banks of the St. Lawrence and of the Ganges than nearer streams incomparably greater in length and volume. Why this should be so, the Philistine who takes no account of the magical power of poetry may find it hard to understand. Those waters of Kyle, Carrick, and Cunningham are short of course and lacking in features of scenery that are in any marked degree impressive or sublime. Their beauty, such as it is, they owe as much to Art as to Nature. None of them can be said to be in any genuine sense navigable. It is true that some among them are centres and outlets of important industries. But even in the sordid affairs of trade their valleys hardly take a first rank among Scottish streams. Commercially, and almost geographically, they might be described as mere tributaries of the wealthy Clyde. The headsprings of these Ayrshire waters are nowhere more than twenty or thirty miles distant from the shores of the Firth, and their sources as well as their mouths come within the range of view of travellers by that broad highway to the Broomielaw. They rise for the most part in high and featureless moorlands, where the county of Ayr borders with Galloway, Lanark, and Renfrew, and disappear in the folds of a lower country in which one appraiser of the picturesque has discovered a general character of "insipidity"--a character which every true-born son of Ayrshire will vehemently deny as belonging to the landscapes of his county, pointing, as his witnesses, to many a "flowery brae," bold crag, and richly-wooded dell watered by the clear currents of his native streams. Some of these slip quietly to the sea behind hills of bent and sand, lonely except for the golfer, the salmon-fisher, and the sea-fowl. Others have at their mouths ancient burghs, busy seaports or pleasant Clyde watering-places flanked by breezy links or steep cliff and headland, that look out across sand and wave to the purple peaks of Arran, to the huge columnar stack of Ailsa Craig, to Bute, and the Cumbraes, and the other wonders of those Western seas. [Illustration: SORN (_p. 332_).]