... Yet Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the
seeming desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous
of the Antilles. Other islands have been less fortunate: the era
of depression has almost passed for Grenada; through the rapid
development of her secondary cultures--coffee and cocoa--she
hopes with good reason to repair some of the vast losses involved
by the decay of the sugar industry.

Still, in this silence of mouldering streets, this melancholy of
abandoned dwellings, this invasion of vegetation, there is a
suggestion of what any West Indian port might become when the
resources of the island had been exhausted, and its commerce
ruined. After all persons of means and energy enough to seek
other fields of industry and enterprise had taken their
departure, and the plantations had been abandoned, and the
warehouses closed up forever, and the voiceless wharves left to
rot down into the green water, Nature would soon so veil the
place as to obliterate every outward visible sign of the past.
In scarcely more than a generation from the time that the last
merchant steamer had taken her departure some traveller might
look for the once populous and busy mart in vain: vegetation
would have devoured it.

... In the mixed English and creole speech of the black
population one can discern evidence of a linguistic transition.
The original French _patois_ is being rapidly forgotten or
transformed irrecognizably.

Now, in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So