The two South Sea books occupied much of his time, but it was of his own land and people so far away that he had so little hope of ever seeing again, he loved best to write.
"It is a singular thing," he wrote to James Barrie, "that I should live here in the South Seas, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we came."
He finished and sent away further adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck under the title of "David Balfour." "St. Ives" followed with its scenes laid around Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and the Pentland Hills. In his last book, "Weir of Hermiston," the one he left unfinished, broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed the streets of Auld Reekie again with a hero very like what he had once been himself, who was likewise an enthusiastic member of the "Spec."
Something which pleased him greatly at this time was the news from his friend Charles Baxter in Edinburgh that a complete edition of his works was to be published in the best possible form with a limited number of copies, to be called the "Edinburgh Edition."
"I suppose it was your idea to give it that name," Stevenson wrote, thanking 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.