were doubly uncertain, letters
crossed between Kosciuszko and friends in far-off Poland. "Two years ago
I had a letter from him," wrote Adam Czartoryski in 1778, as he
requested Benjamin Franklin to ascertain what had become of the youth in
whom he had been interested; "but from that time I have heard nothing of
him."[1] Some sort of correspondence was carried on by Tadeusz with a
friend and neighbour of his in his old home, Julian Niemcewicz, the poet
and future politician, later to be Kosciuszko's companion in the Rising
and his fellow-prisoner and exile. Niemcewicz, wrote the Princess
Lubomirska who had been Ludwika Sosnowska, to Kosciuszko in America,
"has told me that you are alive, he gave me your letter to read, and I
in my turn hasten to tell you through Julian that in my heart I am
unalterably and till death yours."[1*]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_.]

[Footnote 1*: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_.]

This letter, the same in which the lady gives the remarkable account of
her marriage to which we have already alluded, left Kosciuszko cold.
That chapter was entirely put away from him. The first and hopeless
romance of his youth had naturally enough been driven off the field by
stirring and strenuous action in a new hemisphere. Even had this not
been the case, Kosciuszko was of too high a moral mould to cherish a
passion for a married woman. His relations with the other sex were
always of the most delicate, most courteous and most chivalrous; but,
admired and honoured by women as he invariably was, they in reality
enter but little in his life.

Now that the war had ended Kosciuszko only waited to wind up his affairs
in America, and then he could keep away from his country no longer. He
started for Europe in July 1784, landed in France, and by way of Paris
reached Poland in the same year. From America he brought an enhanced
attraction to the democratic ideas that were gaining vogue in Europe,
and which had had a hold over him from his youth. Still more, he had
seen with his own eyes the miracle of a national struggle.

[Footnote 1: _op. cit._]

He had fought and marched side by side with ragged, starving,
undisciplined, unpaid men who had carried off the victory against a
powerful nation and a regular army. With that memory burnt into his
soul, ten years later he led a more desperate throw for a freedom to him
incomparably dearer--his country's.

CHAPTER III

THE YEARS OF PEACE

When Kosciuszko re