April 8. —­ Eureka!  Pundit is in his glory.  A balloon from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and threw on board several late papers; they contain some exceedingly curious information relative to Kanawdian or rather Amriccan antiquities.  You know, I presume, that laborers have for some months been employed in preparing the ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the Emperor’s principal pleasure garden.  Paradise, it appears, has been, literally speaking, an island time out of mind —­ that is to say, its northern boundary was always (as far back as any record extends) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm of the sea.  This arm was gradually widened until it attained its present breadth —­ a mile.  The whole length of the island is nine miles; the breadth varies materially.  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