nifestations of
that God-given reason which can clearly see things as they are as well
as things as they should be, and see both to good and helpful purpose?

In 1802 Paine returned to America, just sixty-five years old. He had
suffered terribly, had rendered great services and it was at least
reasonable that he should expect a welcome. What happened is tersely
told by Rufus Rockwell Wilson:

"When, at the age of sixty-five, he came again to the nation
he had helped to create, he was met by the new faces of a
generation that knew him not, and by the cold shoulders,
instead of the outstretched hands, of old friends. This was
the bitter fruit of his 'Age of Reason,' which remains of
all epoch-making books the one most persistently misquoted
and misunderstood; for even now there are those who rate it
as scoffing and scurrilous, whereas its tone throughout is
noble and reverent, and some of the doctrines which it
teaches are now recognised as not inimical to religion."

Brailsford, of a more picturesque turn of phrase, says that
"slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy" were
against him, and adds:

"... The grandsons of the Puritan Colonists who had flogged
Quaker women as witches denied him a place on the
stage-coach, lest an offended God should strike it with
lightning."

The state of New York, in a really surprising burst of generosity,
presented him a farm in New Rochelle, and then, lest he imagine the
Government too grateful, took away his right to vote there. They
offered the flimsy excuse that he was a French citizen,--which, of
course, he wasn't,--but it was all part of the persecution inspired by
organised bigotry and the resentful conservative interests which he
had so long and so unflaggingly attacked.

And so at last to Greenwich Village! Though I cannot engage that we
shall not step out of it before we are through.

Thomas Paine was old and weary with his arduous and honourable years
when he came to live in the little frame house on Herring Street, kept
by one Mrs. Ryder.

John Randel, Jr., engineer to the Commissioners who were at work
re-cutting New York, has given us this picture of Paine:

"I boarded in the city, and in going to the office almost
daily passed the house in Herring Street" [now No. 309
Bleecker Street] "where Thomas Paine resided, and frequently
in fair weather saw him sitt