The Crow That Could Talk
                            From a March 9, 1893 issue of the Alabama Tribune

    “When I was living at the foot of Pinxter Peak I had a pet crow that was worth considerable to me,” stated a man named John from the Loyalsock community. “The way I came to get the crow was a little remarkable. One of my boys was flying his kite in the early summer, and when it had sailed up over a patch of woods the string broke and the kite lodged in the top of a hemlock tree. The boy cried about the loss of his kite, and I had to climb the tree to get it for him.
  “A crow flew off her nest near the top of the tree while I was climbing up, and when I reached the nest I found a single egg in it. After I had freed the kite, I placed the crow’s egg in my mouth and backed down the tree. I then ran to the barn and put the egg under a hen that had been sitting a day or so. The old hen didn’t object, and several days before she came off her chickens she hatched out the liveliest little crow I ever saw.
  “We began to raise the baby crow in the house. When he was big enough to run around on the floor I named him Kite. He learned to say a good many words by the time he was a year old, and one summer morning I heard him yelling down the unused chimney at a lot of swallows that were nesting in it. The birds were making a great racket, and Kite was singing out, ‘Hold your tongue!’ as loud as he could yell.  “Kite could tell the time of day by the clock, and when the weather was cloudy I used to send him to the house from the field to see what time it was. Instead of asking my wife, the crow would look at the clock without saying a word to her. Then he would fly back to the lot and sing it out to me. When the sky was clear I could tell by the sun within 10 minutes what time it was, and the crow got so close that he could guess almost as close as I could.
  “One sunshiny afternoon I told Kite to fly to the house and bring me the time. The crow cocked his head to one side, glanced up at the sun and said, ‘It’s five minutes to eleven, John!’ I told him it was later than that, and he flew to the house and back and said, ‘It’s two minutes to eleven.’ And he was right!
  “The crow got feeble the winter after he was 5 years old. He couldn’t stand the cold, and I kept him in a box half full of shavings behind the stove. He lost his appetite soon after New Year’s. One night when I had gotten ready to go to bed he called me to him and said, ‘John, Kite’ll be dead in the morning.’ I fussed over him and told him he was good for another year, but I couldn’t make him believe it.
  “My bed was near the stove, and in the night the crow crawled out of his box and asked me to put him in bed with me. ‘Kite’s almost gone!’ he whispered, and when I awoke he lay dead on my breast.”