ses sinking into the snow which clogged the
carriage wheels at every turn. Rigorously guarded, each word of their
conversation noted and handed on to the commander, the prisoners were
conveyed in as great secrecy as possible, and were not allowed to halt
at any large town. At Czernihov two Cossack officers brought them a tray
of fine apples, telling them--they spoke in Polish--that Polish blood
flowed in their veins and that they deeply deplored the lot of the
captives. More they were about to add when the Russian guard drove them
off. Traversing White Ruthenia, a country that had so lately been
Poland's, the people watched them pass, not in curiosity, but rather
with looks of interest and compassion. As they changed horses before a
posting-house in Mohylev a tall, thin old peasant, in Polish costume,
was observed by the prisoners among the groups that pressed around them
to be gazing at them with eyes filled with pity, till at last, unable to
contain himself longer, he broke his way through to them, weeping, only
to be thrust aside by the Russian officer in charge. At Witebsk, again,
a band of recruits in the Russian army respectfully uncovered their
heads as Kosciuszko passed, and he knew that they were Poles. These
little incidents cast their transitory gleam over the journey north, as
the party pushed on to Petersburg, across the desolate snow-covered
plains of Russia, through the piercing cold of the Russian winter. At
night the fires of the aurora borealis threw a strange, blood-red light
over the white, unending country. The gloomy silence that held all
nature in its grip was only broken by an occasional crash of a bough
under the weight of snow in the great forests through which the party
passed, or by the wild, sad music of the Russian songs with which the
postilions beguiled the night hours of their journey. Such was the
accompaniment to Kosciuszko's forebodings for his future and that of his
fellow-captives, and to his greater anguish over the fate of his nation.

Petersburg was reached on the 10th of December. The prisoners were
hurried at night through side streets, and then put into boats and taken
by mysterious waterways into the heart of the Peter-Paul fortress. Here
they were separated, Niemcewicz and Fiszer led to a large hall, and
Kosciuszko conducted to another room. That was the last they saw of each
other for two years. On the morning after his first night of solitary
confinement Niemcewicz was brou