one anything
unusual. He never manifested desires or claims for himself, and never
let any opportunity pass of calling attention to and recommending the
merits of others."[1] All those who had been thrown together with him in
the war speak in much the same manner. They notice his sweetness and
uprightness of soul, his high-mindedness and delicate instincts, his
careful thought for the men under his command. Even Harry Lee ("Light
Horse Harry"), while carping at Kosciuszko's talents, to the lack of
which, with no justification, he ascribes Greene's failure before Ninety
Six, renders tribute to his engaging qualities as a comrade and a man.
But Kosciuszko's services did not in the first instance receive the full
recognition that might have been expected from the new Republic. He
alone of all the superior officers of the Revolution received no
promotion other than that given wholesale by Congress, and was forced to
apply personally to Washington to rectify the omission. In language not
too cordial, Washington presented his request to Congress, which
conferred upon Kosciuszko the rank of brigadier-general with the
acknowledgment of its "high sense of his long, faithful and meritorious
services." The recently founded patriotic Society of the Cincinnati, of
which Washington was the first president, elected Kosciuszko as an
honoured member. Its broad blue and white ribbon carrying a golden eagle
and a representation of Cincinnatus before the Roman Senate, with the
inscription: "Omnia relinquit servare Rempublicam," is often to be seen
in the portraits of Kosciuszko, suspended on his breast.

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_.]

Kosciuszko was now a landowner of American soil, by virtue of the grant
by Congress of so many acres to the officers who had fought in the war.
Friendship, affluence, a tranquil life on his own property, that most
alluring of prospects to a son of a race which loves Mother Earth with
an intense attachment, lay before him in the New World. To him nothing
was worth the Poland that he had left as an obscure and disappointed
youth.

For all these years his heart had clung to the memory of his native
land. On the rocks of West Point he had walked in solitude under the
trees of his garden, and sat by the fountain which is still shown,
yearning with an exile's home-sickness for his country. At times,
probably very rarely in days of long and difficult transit and when
communications for a fighting-line