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Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1834, by SAMUEL L. KNAPP, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York.

PREFACE.

A FEW months since, when exhausted by hard labor, I visited West Point to breathe a little fresh air among the hospitable inhabitants of that delightful spot. After a fatiguing walk to Fort Putnam, a ruin examined by every visitor at the Point, I sought the retreat called KoscIUSZKO'S GARDEN. I had seen it in former years, when it was nearly inaccessible to all but clambering youths. It was now a different sort of place. It had been touched by the hand of taste, and afforded a pleasant nook for reading and contemplation. The garden is situated in the shelvy rocks which form the right bank of the Hudson, about fifty or sixty rods southerly from the point on which the monument erected by the Cadets to the memory of Kosciuszko now stands. You descend by a well gravelled path-way, about eighty feet, not uncomfortably steep, then by flights of steps forty feet more, when you reach the garden-which is a surface of rock, through the fissures of which spring a scanty and stunted vegetation. The garden is about thirty feet in length, and in width, in its utmost extent, not more than twenty feet, and in some parts much less. Near the centre of the garden there is a beautiful marble basin, from whose bottom through a small perforation, flows upward a spring of sweet water, which is carried off by overflowing on the east side of the basin towards the river, the surface of which is about eighty feet below the gar

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