erially. The entire
area (so Pundit says) was, about eight hundred years ago, densely packed
with houses, some of them twenty stories high; land (for some most
unaccountable reason) being considered as especially precious just in
this vicinity. The disastrous earthquake, however, of the year 2050, so
totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was almost too large
to be called a village) that the most indefatigable of our antiquarians
have never yet been able to obtain from the site any sufficient data (in
the shape of coins, medals or inscriptions) wherewith to build up even
the ghost of a theory concerning the manners, customs, &c., &c., &c.,
of the aboriginal inhabitants. Nearly all that we have hitherto known of
them is, that they were a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe of savages
infesting the continent at its first discovery by Recorder Riker, a
knight of the Golden Fleece. They were by no means uncivilized, however,
but cultivated various arts and even sciences after a fashion of their
own. It is related of them that they were acute in many respects, but
were oddly afflicted with monomania for building what, in the ancient
Amriccan, was denominated "churches"--a kind of pagoda instituted for
the worship of two idols that went by the names of Wealth and Fashion.
In the end, it is said, the island became, nine tenths of it,
church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed by a natural
protuberance of the region just below the small of the back--although,
most unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the
light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women have
in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd, very--like
something between a turkey-cock and a dromedary.

Well, these few details are nearly all that have descended to us
respecting the ancient Knickerbockers. It seems, however, that while
digging in the centre of the emperors garden, (which, you know, covers
the whole island), some of the workmen unearthed a cubical and evidently
chiseled block of granite, weighing several hundred pounds. It was in
good preservation, having received, apparently, little injury from the
convulsion which entombed it. On one of its surfaces was a marble slab
with (only think of it!) an inscription--a legible inscription. Pundit
is in ecstacies. Upon detaching the slab, a cavity appeared, containing
a leaden box filled with various coins, a long scroll of names, several
doc