“I hated to own up to five pieces,” sighed Babe, “not because I begrudged the beggarly pence they cost, but because I am ashamed of my appetite. Girls, there are more rooms up-stairs.”
“Let’s have breakfast here to-morrow before we go to Ayr,” suggested Betty. “Mrs. Hildreth won’t be up early enough to eat with us at the hotel, so we might just as well come here.”
“All right,” agreed Babbie. “Does the man from Cook’s know when trains leave for Ayr?”
He didn’t, and there was a rush to find out and purchase tickets before dinner-time.
“I’m crazy to see Ayr,” said Babe the next day. “I’m very fond of Burns’s poems, and I can just imagine the sleepy, old-fashioned little hamlet he was born in. His birthplace and the haunted kirk and the bridges across the Doon and all the other Burns relics are out in the country, about two miles from the station. Let’s buy some fruit and sweet chocolate and eat our lunch on the way. It will be a lovely walk, I’m sure.”
“Along English lanes, with tall hedgerows on each side,” added Babbie dreamily. “What a pity it’s too late for primroses.”
So great was their disappointment, when the train stopped at Ayr, to find themselves in a busy, prosperous, specklessly clean town, with a paved square just back of the station, where one was expected to sit and wait for the tram that ran out to the birthplace of Robert Burns once in ten minutes.
“There’s nothing to do but take their old tram, I suppose,” sighed Babe disconsolately. “It’s no fun walking along a car-track. Fancy this smug, bustling factory-town being Ayr! Is all Europe fixed up like this, Madeline?”
Madeline assured her that it wasn’t, and Babbie declared that if Oban was horrid and new they would go straight to London by the first train. “For there’s nothing horrid and new about London,” she declared.
When they arrived at the house where Burns was born, Babe objected again because the thatched roof and the whitewashed walls looked so new; but the churchyard was beautiful and the “Auld Brig” picturesque, and they were just beginning to enjoy themselves, when two heavily-loaded trams came up, and soon the place was swarming with talkative Americans, most of them from the same boat that the girls had crossed on.