Good Friday the city was lit
up by conflagrations, while its pavements streamed with blood. When the
morning of Holy Saturday broke the Russians were out of the capital of
Poland, and all the Easter bells in Warsaw were crashing forth peals of
joy. Stanislas Augustus, who a few weeks earlier had at Igelstrom's
bidding publicly proclaimed Kosciuszko to be a rebel and an outlaw, now
went over to the winning side. On Easter Sunday the cathedral rang to
the strains of the _Te Deum_, at which the King assisted, and on the
same day the citizens of Warsaw signed the Act of the Rising and the
oath of allegiance to Kosciuszko. The news was brought into Kosciuszko's
camp in hot haste by an officer from Warsaw. It was in the evening.
Drums beat, the camp re-echoed with song, and on the following morning a
solemn Mass of thanksgiving was celebrated. No salvos were fired, in
order to spare the powder. "Henceforth," joyfully cried Kosciuszko in a
manifesto to his country, "the gratitude of the nation will join their
names"--those of Mokronowski and Zakrzewski, the President of Warsaw,
who had been mainly responsible for the city's deliverance--"with the
love of country itself. Nation! These are the glorious deeds of thy
Rising; but," adds Kosciuszko, whose foresight and sober judgment were
never carried away by success, "remember this truth that thou hast done
nothing so long as there is left anything still to be done."[1]

[Footnote 3: A. Choloniewski, _Tadeusz Kosciuszko_. Lwow, 1902
(Polish).]

[Footnote 1: _Kosciuszko_. Periodical Publication, 1893-6. Cracow
(Polish).]

Three days after Warsaw was freed, Wilno, with a handful of soldiers
rising in the night, drove out the Russian garrison, and the Russian
army retreated through Lithuania, marking their way by atrocities which
were but a foretaste of what awaited in no distant future that most
unhappy land.

"The powerful God," says the pronunciamento of the Provisional Deputy
Council of Wilno--"delivering the Polish nation from the cruel yoke
of slavery has, O citizens of Lithuania, sent Tadeusz Kosciuszko, our
fellow-countryman, to the holy soil to fulfil His will. By reason of the
valour of that man whose very dust your posterity will honour and
revere, the liberties of the Poles have been born again. At the name
alone of that knightly man the Polish land has taken another form,
another spirit has begun to govern the heart of the dweller in an
oppressed country. ... To hi