ing him. "No other would have affected me in the same manner....
Could a more presumptuous idea have occurred to us in those days when we
used to search our pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine
forces to produce the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, than
that I should be strong and well at the age of forty three in the island
of Upolu, and that you should be at home bringing out the 'Edinburgh
Edition'?"

In spite of the many interests in his present life, his love for the
people and the country, the yearning for the friends far away grew
daily.

How he longed to have them see Vailima with all its beauties! To talk
over old times again. Such visits were continually planned, but they
were never realized.

He seldom complained and those who were with him every day rarely found
him low in spirits. It was into the letters to his old intimates that
these longings crept when it swept over him that, though a voluntary
exile in a pleasant place, he was an exile none the less, with the fate
of him who wrote:

"There's a track across the deep,
And a path across the sea,
But for me there's nae return
To my ain countree."

"When the smell of the good wet earth" came to him it came "with a kind
of Highland tone." A tropic shower found him in a "frame of mind and
body that belonged to Scotland." And when he turned to write the
chronicle of his grandfather's life and work, the beautiful words in
which he described the old gentleman's farewell to "Sumbraugh and the
wild crags of Skye" meant likewise his own farewell to those shores. No
more was he to "see the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell
Rock," no more to see "the castle on its hills," or the venerable city
which he always thought of as his home.

"Like Leyden," he wrote, "I have gone into a far land to die, not stayed
like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil."

It was drawing near the close of their fourth year in Apia. On November
13 his birthday had been celebrated with the usual festivities, and on
Thanksgiving Day he had given a dinner to his American friends--and then
the end of all his wanderings and working came suddenly.

"He wrote hard all that morning of the last day," says Lloyd Osbourne,
"on his half-finished book Hermiston.... In the afternoon the mail fell
to be answered; not business correspondence--but replies to the long,
kindly letters of distant friends, received but two days since, and
stil