and foresight that were
customary with him. He was ordered in September to move to Podolia, on
the frontiers of which the Russians were massing. He stayed in that
district for many months until the July of 1791.

There the commandant of Kamieniec was no other than his old comrade and
friend, Orlowski.

"Truly beloved friend," wrote Orlowski to Kosciuszko during the winter
of 1790, chaffing him on the untiring activity that he displayed at his
post: "I hear from everybody that you don't sit still in any place for a
couple of hours, and that you only roam about like a Tartar, not
settling anywhere. However, I approve of that. It is evident that you
mean to maintain your regiment in the discipline and regularity of
military service. I foresee yet another cause for your roaming about the
world, which you divulged in my presence. You write to me for a little
wife, if I can find one here for you."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_.]

For, as is clear from various expressions in Kosciuszko's letters, the
soldier, who was no longer young, was yearning for domestic happiness.
And now, in the turmoil of warlike preparations, he fell in love with a
girl of eighteen, Tekla Zurowska, the daughter of a noble, and heiress
to his estates. The courtship between the general bordering on middle
age--he was then forty-five--and this child in her teens has given us
Kosciuszko's love-letters that are among the most charming productions
of his pen, for their tenderness and their half-playful chivalry,
characteristic not only of Poland's national hero, but in themselves
typically Polish. The couple met for the first time at a ball in a
country manor-house. We can visualize the picturesque spectacle of the
ballroom, brilliant with the gorgeous national costumes of the guests,
both men and ladies; the rugged and simple soldier in his Polish
uniform, courteously handing to the many figured Mazur or the stately
Polonaise the slim girlish form sporting her tight sleeveless little
coat with military facings and rich fur edgings and sleeve-like
streamers drooping from the shoulders, with her hair dressed in two long
plaits sweeping to her skirts. The girl's family was staying in the town
that was Kosciuszko's head-quarters, and so near Kosciuszko's rooms that
the lovers could watch each other from their windows. Seeing one of
Kosciuszko's officers leave his general's house in haste, Tekla, with
the assurance, to use no harsher term, of he