FEBRUARY 13.

Two Jamaica nightingales have established themselves on the orange tree which grows against my window, and their song is most beautiful. This bird is also called “the mocking-bird,” from its facility of imitating, not only the notes of every other animal, but—I am told—of catching every tune that may be played or sung two or three times in the house near which it resides, after which it will go through the air with the greatest taste and precision, throwing in cadences and ornaments that Catalani herself might envy.

But by far the most curious animal that I have yet seen in Jamaica is “the soldier,” a species of crab, which inhabits a shell like a snail’s, so small in proportion to its limbs, that nothing can be more curious or admirable than the machinery by which it is enabled to fold them up instantly on the slightest alarm. They inhabit the mountains, but regularly once a year travel in large troops down to the seaside to spawn and change their shells. If I recollect right, Goldsmith gives a very full and entertaining account of this animal, by the name of “the soldier crab.” They are seldom used in Jamaica except for soups, which are reckoned delicious: that which was brought to me was a very small one, the shell being no bigger than a large snail’s, although the animal itself, when marching with his house on his back, appears to be above thrice the size; but I am told that they are frequently as large as a man’s fist. Mine was found alone in the public road: how it came to be in so solitary a state, I know not, for in general they move in armies, and march towards the sea in a straight line; I am afraid, by his being found alone, that my soldier must have been a deserter.

FEBRUARY 14.

To-day there was a shower of rain for the first time since my arrival; indeed, not a drop has fallen since the 16th of November; and in consequence my present crop has suffered terribly, and our expectations for next season are still worse.

FEBRUARY 18. (Sunday.)

The rain has brought forth the fire-flies, and in the evening the hedges are all brilliant with their numbers. In the day they seem to be torpid beetles of a dull reddish colour, but at night they become of a shining purple. The fire proceeds from two small spots in the back part of the head. It is yellow in the light, and requires motion to throw out its radiance in perfection; but as soon as it is touched, the fly struggles violently, and bends itself together with a clicking noise like the snap of a spring; and I understand that this effort is necessary to set it in motion. It is sufficiently strong to turn itself upwards with a single movement, if lying on its back: some people say that it is always obliged to throw itself upon its back in order to take wing; but this I have, again, heard others contradict. When confined in a glass, the light seems almost extinguished; nothing can be discerned but two pale yellow spots; but on being pressed by the hand it becomes more brilliant than any emerald, and when on the wing it seems entirely composed of the most beautifully coloured fire.

FEBRUARY 20.

I attended the Slave Court, where a negro was tried for sheep-stealing, and a black servant girl for attempting to poison her master. The former was sentenced to be transported. The latter was a girl of fifteen, called Minetta: she acknowledged the having infused corrosive sublimate in some brandy and water; but asserted that she had taken it from the medicine chest without knowing it to be poison, and had given it to her master at her grandmother’s desire. This account was evidently a fabrication: there was no doubt of the grandmother’s innocence, although some suspicion attached to the mother’s influence; but as to the girl herself, nothing could be more hardened than her conduct through the whole transaction. She stood by the bed to see her master drink the poison; witnessed his agonies without one expression of surprise or pity; and when she was ordered to leave the room, she pretended to be fast asleep, and not to hear what was said to her. Even since her imprisonment, she could never be prevailed upon to say that she was sorry for her master’s having been poisoned; and she told the people in the gaol, that “they could do nothing to her, for she had turned king’s evidence against her grandmother.” She was condemned to die on Thursday next, the day after to-morrow: she heard the sentence pronounced without the least emotion; and I am told, that when she went down the steps of the courthouse, she was seen to laugh.

The trial appeared to be conducted with all possible justice and propriety; the jury consisted of nine respectable persons; the bench of three magistrates, and a senior one to preside. There were no lawyers employed on either side; consequently no appeals to the passions, no false lights thrown out, no traps, no flaws, no quibbles, no artful cross-examinings, and no brow-beating of witnesses; and I cannot say that the trial appeared to me to go on at all the worse. Nobody appeared to be either for or against the prisoner; the only object of all present was evidently to come at the truth, and I sincerely believe that they obtained their object. The only part of the trial of which I disapproved was the ordering the culprit to such immediate execution, that sufficient time was not allowed for the exercise of the royal prerogative, should the governor have been disposed to commute the punishment for that of transportation.