Through these last years Kościuszko's heart ever clung fondly to his own land and language. On the French letters he received his hand, as he read, was wont to trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued to be one of the matters in which he most keenly interested himself. During his stay in Vienna he had drawn up a memorandum on the subject for those responsible for the department in the Kingdom of Poland then forming. One of his last expeditions before his death was to a great Swiss educational establishment where Pestalozzi's system had been 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.