ith
the business entrusted to him.

[Footnote 1: Jared Sparks, _Writings of George Washington_.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_.]

Kosciuszko's work at West Point was the longest and the most important
of his undertakings in the United States, and is inseparably connected
in the American mind with his name. Little is now left of his
fortifications; but the monument raised in his honour by the American
youth, with the inscription: "To the hero of two worlds" remains, a
grateful tribute to his memory. That the military students of the United
States can look back to West Point as their Alma Mater is in great
measure Kosciuszko's doing. When it was first resolved to found a
training school in arms for the young men of the States, Kosciuszko
urged that it should be placed at West Point, and suggested the spot
where it now stands.

Kosciuszko was at West Point for two years. Here, if we do not accept
the legends and conjectures of former meetings, he met Washington for
the first time. He had two thousand five hundred workmen under him, whom
he treated with the courtesy and consideration that always distinguished
his dealings with his fellow-men, whether his equals or subordinates.
The story goes that with his own hands, assisted by his American
workmen, he built himself some sort of cottage or shanty in the hope of
one day receiving his own countrymen as his guests. One of his modern
Polish biographers often heard in his youth a song purporting to be
Kosciuszko's composition, with the tradition that he had composed it to
his guitar--he played both the guitar and the violin--on the arrival of
Polish visitors.[1] The doggerel, kindly little verses, express the
hope that everything his compatriots see in his modest house will be as
agreeable to them as their company is to their host, and inform them
that he raised its walls with the purpose of welcoming them therein. It
is a fact that, true to the Pole's passion for the soil, he laid out a
little garden, still known as "Kosciuszko's Garden," where he loved to
spend his leisure hours, alone with his thoughts of Poland. Times were
hard at West Point and provisions scanty. Washington himself could not
sufficiently furnish his table, and Kosciuszko naturally fared worse;
but out of the pay that he could ill afford and from his own inadequate
stores the Pole constantly sent provisions to the English prisoners,
whose misery was extreme. It is said, indeed, that had it not been for
Kosciusz