a convent, whence she was dragged
by a ruse and forced to the bridal altar, as long afterwards she told
Kosciuszko, was a romantic invention of her own or an embroidery, after
the fashion of her century, on some foundation of fact, it is impossible
to say; but it is certain that through her unhappy married life she
clung fondly to the memory of her first and young lover. So long after
the rupture as fourteen years his name was a forbidden topic between
herself and her mother, and at a critical moment in Kosciuszko's career
we shall find her stepping in to use her rank and position with
Stanislas Augustus on his behalf.

With home, fortune, hopes of domestic happiness, all chance of serving
his country, gone, Kosciuszko determined to seek another sphere. He left
Poland in the autumn of 1775.

Poverty constrained him to make the journey in the cheapest manner
possible. He therefore went down the Vistula in a barge, one of the
picturesque flat-bottomed craft that still ply on Poland's greatest
river--the river which flows through two of her capitals and was, it is
well said, partitioned with the land it waters from the Carpathians to
the Baltic, On his way down the river he would, observes his chief
Polish biographer, have seen for the first time, and not the last, the
evidence before his eyes that his country lay conquered as his boat
passed the Prussian cordon over waters that once were Polish. Thus he
came down to the quaint old port of Danzig, with its stately old-world
burgher palaces and heavily carved street doors, then still Poland's,
but which Prussia was only biding her time to seize in a fresh
dismemberment of Polish territory.

Dead silence surrounds the following six months of Kosciuszko's life.
Every probability points to the fact that he would have gone to Paris,
where he had studied so long and where he had many friends and
interests. The envoys from America were there on the mission of
enlisting the help of France in the conflict of the States with Great
Britain. We do not know whether Kosciuszko became personally acquainted
with any of them. At all events the air was full of the story of a young
country striving for her independence; and it is not surprising that
when next the figure of Kosciuszko stands out clearly in the face of
history it is as a volunteer offering his sword to the United States to
fight in the cause of freedom.

CHAPTER II

THE FIGHT FOR AMERICAN FREEDOM

In the early su