exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and
sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic
hills, the cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that
tower to heaven, the peaks perpetually wearing that luminous
cloud which seems the breathing of each island-life,--its vital
manifestation....

[Illustration: CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA.]

... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar
impressions received begin to group and blend, to form
homogeneous results,--general ideas or convictions. Strongest
among these is the belief that the white race is disappearing
from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a cost of blood
and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have been
advanced--economical, climatic, ethnical, political--all of which
contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the
fact. Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing
at a rate that almost staggers credibility. In the island
paradise of Martinique in 1848 there were 12,000 whites; now,
against more than 160,000 blacks and half-breeds, there are
perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic struggle, and the
number of these latter is annually growing less. Many of the
British islands have been almost deserted by their former
cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin;
St. Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling;
Grenada has lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the
most prosperous, the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West
Indian ports, is in full decadence. And while the white element
is disappearing, the dark races are multiplying as never before;-