Page:Kościuszko A Biography by Monika M Gardner.djvu/169

 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 Kościuszko'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 Kościuszko 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 brought coffee in a cup that he recognized as Kościuszko's property. This alone told him that Kościuszko was not far off; and cheered by that thought he was able, says he, "to resign himself to everything."

The narrative of Niemcewicz, to which we owe the story of each step of the journey into Russia, can now, beyond a vague report that the poet from time to time gleaned from his jailors, tell us next to nothing more of Kościuszko in a Russian prison. Detailed information from other sources is wanting, and we