The county might be likened in shape to a boomerang, or to a crescent moon, with horns tapering to a point towards the north and south, the shore-line from Wemyss Bay to Loch Ryan representing the concave inner edge, and the land frontier, roughly approximating to the boundary of the river-basins, standing for the outer surface. To the north the brown moorlands come near to the sea; the streams are correspondingly short, and the strip of fertile coast-territory narrows to nothing. But from the basin of Garnock to that of Doon there extends a diversified plain country, intersected by broad ridges, veined in all directions by roads and railway lines, full of thriving towns and villages, and amply endowed with the charms of wood, water, rock, and hill, as well as with coalfields, pastures, and cornlands. This is the heart of Ayrshire--the classic ground where the Ayr and the Doon are the chief among a host of streams whose currents flow to the music of the choicest of Scotland's lyric songs. South of Doon lies the broken sea of hills known as Carrick, a country with a poorer surface and a wilder and higher background of green or heathy mountains, yet with many beautiful and some spacious and famous river-valleys opening between its barer uplands, which run down to the coast in bold promontories, crowned with ancient castles, or front it with walls of cliff pierced with caves in which has found refuge many a legend of the Killing or the Smuggling times. Not, however, by its memorials and traditions of old strifes--or not by these chiefly--are the hearts and the feet of strangers drawn to Ayrshire. It is the "Land of Burns." The spirit of the song of the Ploughman-Bard has taken possession of the banks of its streams, and has almost silenced all older and harsher strains. Those who wander by them think less about Bruce and Wallace, the grim deeds of the Earls of Cassilis and Lairds of Auchendrane, and the dour faces and pathetic deaths of the martyrs of the Covenant, than of Tam o' Shanter glowering in at the "winnock-bunker" of Alloway's auld haunted kirk, of the "Jolly Beggars" feasting and singing round Poosie Nancy's fireside at Mauchline, and of all the rustic Nells and Jeans, and Nannies and Bessies, and Marys, with whose praises Burns has made the waters of Ayr vocal for all time. But chiefly the music of their currents seems to be a running accompaniment to his own stormy life. It reminds us of his youthful saunterings "adoun some trottin' burn's meander" while the voice of poetry in him was yet only struggling for utterance; of his later hours of rapture or of anguish in meetings with his "Bonnie Jean" in the woods of Catrine or Barskimming or Ballochmyle, or in his parting with Highland Mary where the Fail steals by leafy coverts past the Castle o' Montgomerie to meet the Ayr; and all the other episodes of passionate or pawky love which he turned to song as naturally and spontaneously as do the birds.