While he was in Ayr Douglass wrote a letter in which he described at length his visit to Burns's monument and to the cottage of Burns's surviving sister and her two daughters. Isabella Burns Begg, who had been a guest of honour at the 1844 festival, gave Douglass and Buffum a warm welcome. ‘[T]hough approaching 80, she does not look to be more than sixty,’ Douglass remarks. ‘She enjoys good health, is a spirited looking woman, and bids fair to live yet many days.’

‘I am now in Ayr,’ he begins. ‘It is famous for being the birth-place of Robert Burns, the poet, by whose brilliant genius every stream, hill, glen and valley in the neighborhood have been made classic.’ On their arrival, they were greeted by Rev. Renwick and immediately escorted to the monument, three miles distant, following a wellworn tourist route. They would have passed the elegant house and grounds of Rozelle, the residence of Archibald and Lady Hamilton, named by her grandfather after his estate in Jamaica. After pausing at the cottage where Burns was born, now an inn, the trio would have soon reached the roofless Alloway Kirk, and, a few hundred yards beyond, inspected the Auld Brig over the Doon. Between them was the imposing monument, well situated, thought Douglass, as it overlooked all these places immortalised by the poet, as well as affording a view of the Firth of Clyde and the mountainous outline of Arran shrouded in mist – a setting he finds ‘admirably and beautifully adapted to the monument of Scotland's noble bard’.

He goes on to dwell on inanimate memorials of the poet's life: a marble bust, two statues, letters in his own hand and an original portrait, but what moves him most is

and Douglass quotes in full the poet's song The Banks o’ Doon, in which the river serves as an unwelcome reminder of ‘joys, / departed, never to return’.