rofessor of Law at
Columbia College, when not at work (those were rare moments indeed),
loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost
beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and
Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor
Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled
up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and
the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the
physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this
James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory
lives in his _Commentaries on American Law_.

Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and
untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading
across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little
country place that had been an Indian village before the settling of
New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes,
and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling
house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a
dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from
New York for all the likeness it bore to it.

On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village
towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by
writing _Common Sense_, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing
_The Age of Reason_, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the
quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless
man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread
name--Tom Paine.

There he lived with Madame Bonneville and her two sons, the only
companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that
picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in
solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement.

It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that
seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker
Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street,
and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking
towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he
lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that
have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is
made into a store