tion failed in the
overcrowded house, the men slept in the barn. In the day they hunted,
shot, rode, or went off in parties, mushroom hunting. If to the pure and
unspoiled influence of his home Kosciuszko owes something at least of
the moral rectitude and devotion to duty from which he never swerved,
the country life of Lithuania, with its freedom and its strange charm,
the life that he loved above all others, has probably a good deal to say
to the simplicity of nature and the straightness of outlook that are
such strongly marked characteristics in this son of the Lithuanian
forests.

His early education was given him by his mother, a woman of remarkable
force of character and practical capacity. Left a widow with four
children under age, of whom Tadeusz was the youngest, she, with her
clear head and untiring energy, managed several farms and skilfully
conducted the highly complicated money matters of the family. Tadeusz's
home schooling ended with his father's death when the child was twelve
years old. He then attended the Jesuit college at the chief town in his
district, Brzesc. He was a diligent and clever boy who loved his book
and who showed a good deal of talent for drawing. He left school with a
sound classical training and with an early developed passion for his
country. Already Timoleon was his favourite hero of antiquity because,
so he told a friend fifty years later, "he was able to restore his
nation's freedom, taking nothing for himself."

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_. Cracow, 1894; later edition, 1906
(Polish).]

In 1763 the long and dreary reign of Augustus III, the last Saxon king
of Poland, came to an end. Russian diplomacy, supported by Russian
cannon, placed Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, the lover of Catherine
II, upon the Polish throne in 1764. The year following, Kosciuszko, an
unknown boy of nineteen years of age whose destiny was strangely to
collide with that of the newly elected and last sovereign of independent
Poland, was entered in the Corps of Cadets, otherwise called the Royal
School, in Warsaw. Prince Adam Czartoryski, a leading member of the
great family, so predominant then in Polish politics that it was given
the name of "The Family" _par excellence_, frequently visited Lithuania,
where he held high military command and possessed immense estates. Young
Tadeusz attracted his interest, and it was through his influence that
the boy was placed in an establishment of which he wa