In the wildest parts of the mountain regions of Jamaica, where the perilous path winds round a towering cone on the one hand, and on the other looks down into a deep and precipitous gully; or where a narrow track, choked up with tree-ferns on which the vertical sun looks only at noon-day, leads through the dark and damp forest to some lonely negro ground, the traveller is startled by the still wilder tones of the Jabbering Crow. So uncouth and yet so articulate, so varied in the inflexions of their tones, are these sounds, that the wondering stranger can with difficulty believe he is listening to the voice of a bird, but rather supposes he hears the harsh consonants, and deep guttural intonations of some savage language. All the Crows are garrulous, and several are capable of tolerable imitations of human speech, but the present is the only example I am aware of, in which the language of man is resembled by a bird in a state of nature. The resemblance, however, is rather general than particular; every one who hears it is struck with its likeness to speech, though he cannot detect any known words: it is the language of a foreigner. One cannot easily convey an idea of the sounds by writing; but the following fragments which the negroes have been able to catch from the learned bird’s own mouth, will give some notion of their character. “Walk fast, crāb! do buckra work.—Cuttacoo[60] better than wallet.” It must not be supposed that these words uniformly represent the sounds; these and similar combinations of harsh consonants and broad vowels, are varied _ad infinitum_, as are also the tones in which they are expressed. For myself, I have thought them ludicrously like the very peculiar voice of Punch in a puppet-show; others have fancied in them half-a dozen Welshmen quarrelling. These strange sounds are generally poured forth in _sentences_, of varying length, from the summit of some lofty tree, or in the course of the bird’s passage from one to another. [60] A _cuttacoo_ is a negro’s little hand-basket.