Page:Kościuszko A Biography by Monika M Gardner.djvu/205

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inaugurated, and where Kościuszko spent two days among the pupils, watching its working with the idea of its application to Polish requirements.

So his days went by till his quiet death. His death was as simple as had been his life. He put his worldly affairs in order, bequeathing the money of Paul I that he had never touched and that he would not affront Alexander I, with whom his relations were always friendly, by returning, to a Polish friend who had fought under him in the Rising and to Emilia Zeltner. The remainder of all that he had to give went to other members of the Zeltner family and to the poor. He directed that his body should be carried by the poor to the grave, that his own sword should be laid in his coffin and the sword of Sobieski given back to the Polish nation. Then, with a last look of love bent upon the child Emilia, who knelt at the foot of his bed, Tadeusz Kościuszko, the greatest and the most beloved of Poland's heroes, gently breathed his last on the evening of October 15, 1817.

His body now rests in the Wawel in Cracow, where lie Poland's kings and her most honoured dead; his heart in the Polish Museum in Rapperswil, Switzerland, among the national treasures that have been placed in a foreign land to preserve them against spoliation by Poland's conquerors. To his memory three years after his death his nation raised a monument, perhaps unique of its kind. Outside Cracow towers the Kościuszko hill, fashioned by the hands of Polish men, women, and children, all bringing earth in shovel and barrow, to lay over dust, carried thither with no little difficulty, from the battlefields