15

“BUT NO MAN KNOWETH OF HIS SEPULCHRE …”

IT WAS a long passage, but not a bad one; even for the time, it was long, fifty-four days now and still no landfall. The experienced travelers said, no, that was nothing at all; a bad voyage was a hundred days; ships were better now in this year of 1802; you didn’t call a voyage bad until the drinking water went bad, and, God willing, there would be a landfall tomorrow’s dawn.

Tomorrow’s dawn found half the passengers clustered on the foredeck, each wanting to have first sight of the good, green country called America; and the same thing happened on the next day and the next, each time more passengers crowding the dipping prow until at last land was sighted.

Among the passengers was the old man, Paine, standing silently at the rail, peering ahead, trembling a little, and nodding when the captain said, in a rich, down-east twang:

“Looks good, the old country, aye, Mr. Paine?”

“Yes—”

“A leetle bit changed, but not so much that you won’t recognize it.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Well, that’s the way. A man may have an itch to travel, but he’s mighty glad to get home in the end.” Above, they were making sail, and as a loose rope whipped by, the captain roared up, “Look lively there, you confounded lubbers!” And then to Paine, “We’ll make Baltimore close enough, just a day or two. You’ll be going on to Washington?”

“I had planned to,” Paine nodded. His voice was somewhat hesitant as he said, “I will want to see my old friend, Mr. Jefferson. It’s been a long time—”

“There you are,” the captain laughed, raising his voice enough to make sure that those standing by overheard him talking so familiarly with a friend of the President of the United States. Privately, he had little enough sympathy with this old rascal, although Paine was in no way so repulsive as he had been pictured. He was said to be the enemy of Christianity. The captain was a religious man and didn’t hold with that sort of thing, but still it never hurt to put in the right word at the right place.

“There you are,” he laughed. “I go home to the missus, and you go off to dinner with the president.”

And it was time enough, Paine thought to himself, that he had come home. A man wants to die in a friendly place; he wants to have a friend or two about him. The world is too big—a man wants to have just a little corner of it when he’s old and tired. They might hate him, laugh at him, abuse him everywhere else on earth; but America would not forget. The times that tried men’s souls were not so long ago that they should have any real reason for forgetfulness. Washington was dead, but most of the others were still alive. They would remember old Common Sense.

They hadn’t wanted much to do with him on shipboard, and that was just as well; break clean; his work was done. Napoleon was the master of Europe, and all Paine wanted now was to go home and forget.

He came into the president’s house, and the colored doorman announced, “Mr. Paine to see the president,” and it was too much a dream. He felt like an old man in front of Tom Jefferson, although there was only six years’ difference in their ages; Paine felt used up and purposeless before the tall, straight, handsome person who was President of the United States. Jefferson was at the height of his power and glory; the second phase of the revolution, they called it when he won the election, the dawn of the day of the common man. And Paine was used up and finished.

But Jefferson, striding forward, offering his hand and smiling, said, “Tom, Tom, you’re a sight for old eyes. So the wars are over, and you’ve come home! It’s the turn of the wheel, Tom; it’s a sign that fortune is smiling when old comrades come together again.”

Paine could say nothing; he smiled and then he began to cry, and then Jefferson was tactful enough to leave him alone. The old man sat in the reception room of the new presidential house, crying maudlin tears, taking snuff with a trembling hand, and then crying again.

He was all right when Jefferson came back; he was wandering through the two front rooms, peering at the old furniture and standing back to look at the oil portraits of men he had once known and fought by.

“It’s new,” Jefferson explained. “The whole city is new. I like to think that someday it will be one of the great capitals of the world.”

“It will be,” Paine said solemnly.

“You’ll stay for dinner, of course?”

“The president is a busy man—”

“That’s nonsense, and you’ll stay for dinner, Tom. We have a lot to talk about.”

Paine was eager to stay. All during the trip across, he had been speculating upon how Jefferson would welcome him. Even now the two Toms were grouped together as the world’s foremost democrats, and it would be strange indeed if there was not some place for him in the Jefferson administration, even a very small place, such as secretary to the British or French legation, or perhaps one of the lesser cabinet ministers. That would be better, for it would permit him to spend his last years in America, and how could Jefferson evade the responsibility? Didn’t he show immediately that he remembered the old times? A little work, a little honor, a little respect, and he would be able to die content.

It was good to be home.

At dinner, Jefferson beat all around the subject before he came directly to it. Talking about old times, he picked up one memory after another, and it soon became apparent to Paine that he was handling them uneasily; Jefferson was not a man to play hob with his own conscience; he lived by words and ideals, not by actions. He said to Paine:

“It’s not that we ever differed. Our ends were always the same.”

And Paine, eagerly, “That was a consolation in the worst times. If things were black, they were never so black but that I was able to tell myself, There’s one man in the world who understands and believes.”

When coffee and brandy were served, Jefferson shifted the conversation to Paine’s experiences in Europe. But the old man was not anxious to bring back memories of a great hope that had died. It seemed incredibly banal of the president to ask so curiously of those gallant men who had gone forth from the Luxembourg to meet their deaths, Clootz, Danton, Condorcet. Of Marat’s murder by Charlotte Corday, Paine would say nothing at all.

“Done with,” he shrugged. “Now it’s Napoleon. There’s nothing of the republic left.”

“And will the French support him? I can hardly believe that.”

“They’ll support him. They are good people, but now the whole world is ranged against them. What else can they do?”

“I gather you intend to devote yourself to writing,” Jefferson said, and could not help, adding, “The administration will be glad for your support.”

“One does not make revolutions at my age,” Paine smiled.

“No—no, naturally. A long life, well filled, a battle well fought, you might say. So much of what we have, we owe to you; so much of what was done, Paine did. And now a comfortable old age.”

“Old age?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. We are none of us so young as we were, Thomas.”

Holding out a hand that trembled in spite of himself, Paine said defensively, “The machine runs down, but my mind isn’t old. Did they accuse Franklin of being an old man? I have no family—”

“The farm?” Jefferson speculated, referring to the piece of property at New Rochelle that Congress had granted Paine after the war.

“I’m not a farmer. A man wants work, he doesn’t want to be laid on the shelf like a piece of old goods.” That was as near as he could come to asking Jefferson. Well, he understood a little of what the president was thinking, but an old man becomes irritable, wrapped up in the few years that are left to him. Jefferson stared moodily at the backs of his hands and said words to the effect of a president not being his own master, of a new, democratic administration having to start with an uphill fight, of a political alignment that was most complicated. He would never want anything to come between him and Paine; they were too much old, good friends for misunderstanding.

“I see,” Paine nodded.

Jefferson said morosely, “You will find you have your enemies here, Thomas. The letter you addressed to Washington—”

“I won’t talk of him,” Paine growled.

“No, I’m not condoning him. But understand his position, nursing a babe of a state, in no way united, England prodding us and prodding us, and all of us knowing that another war would destroy us. You were in France—”

“Waiting for the guillotine!”

“I know, Thomas. But Washington was a strange man, not brilliant, not discerning; his heart was hurt, and there was a layer of rock over it. You think of the glory and the shouting, but what was that to a man who never in his life had anything he really wanted? He saw his duty, and he tried to perform it—”

“Even if it meant condemning me to death.”

“Even if it meant that,” Jefferson admitted.

There was a while of silence, and then the president mentioned The Age of Reason. He pointed out that the whole administration had been attacked as atheistic. Paine was tired now; seeing how things were, he wanted to get it over with and go.

“If you were to enter the government,” Jefferson finally added, “it would be just the wedge our enemies are seeking.”

Paine smiled and nodded.

“Perhaps in a year or two,” Jefferson said.

In a hotel: “Paine? This is a godly house. We want no part of Paine.”

In the street: “There goes the old beast.”

In a tavern: “Drink with the devil, boys. Antichrist is here!”

And the children, flinging mud and rocks: “Damned old devil! Damned old devil!”

A woman: “You filthy old beast—you filthy, filthy old beast!”

A crowd: “A rope and a tree, and let’s get it over with!”

Paine was home.

He went to visit his old friend Kirkbride at Bordentown. Kirkbride had written that he would be happy—most happy—to see Paine, and when Paine had speculated that perhaps a visit there would do harm to Kirkbride’s reputation, Kirkbride waved the objection aside and begged him to come. Paine still owned the small piece of property at Bordentown, and of late a new, tremulous fear of poverty had taken hold of him. He thought he would look the land over and see whether it was worth selling.

It was good to be back in Bordentown. Word had gone about the Jersey countryside that Paine would be at Kirkbride’s, and any plans the people might have had for abuse and demonstration were nipped when a dozen veterans gathered to pay their respects to their old comrade. Not the leaders, these, not politicians, but brown-skinned dirt farmers, light-eyed, slow-speaking men in their forties and fifties and sixties who had not flown high enough to leave all their memories behind them. Religious, they were, but not so religious that they excluded belief in God and men from their creed.

Gathered in a half-circle around the roaring fire, they paid a drawling tribute to their friend, and they gave Paine the last evening he would want to remember. Speech was slow and hard in coming to these men; their farms far apart, such gatherings were a rare occasion, and it took a good many rounds of old-fashioned flip before their tongues were loosened. Then, like careful masons, treasuring cement in a land where no more mortar could be had, they re-created scene after scene, passing the telling of a tale from one to another, not jealously but calculatingly, as one does with a good thing. They recalled the composition of the first Crisis paper, lingering over such details as the drum Paine had used as a desk.

“Pot-bellied—”

“Rib drum, I think.”

“Now reckon it out, that was a right fancy drum with brass fittings. Johnny Hopper’s, it was.” They passed on to talk about how Johnny Hopper, the little drummer boy, had died at Brandywine, aged sixteen. “Poor damned little tyke.” Then, from him, one old face after another was brought back. It shocked Paine to know how many were dead. Had a whole era, a whole age passed away? It was a roll-call from beyond the grave, Greene, Roberdeau, Putnam, Hamilton, name after name. “Disbanded,” someone said.

But for all the talk of what had been and was no more, it was a good night for Paine, a sweet, warm night, a night to be remembered on such an occasion when as later, after leaving Bordentown, he passed through Trenton on his way to New York and changed coaches there. He never concealed his identity; he was Mr. Paine, and proud of it, but the pick-up coach driver told him:

“Damned if you’ll ride in my stage.”

At which Paine bowed his head and said quietly, “Very well, I’ll wait for the next.”

Between coaches, a gang of teen-age hoodlums gathered. It was amusing to kick the old man’s luggage around, and then to clout him over the back with a stick or a lump of mud when he went to get it. And the best part of it was that grown folks stood about and laughed and cried, “Go to it! Give the old devil what he deserves!” Better fun to spit in his face as he lost his temper, to jolt him with hip or shoulder, to dance just out of his reach, screaming, “There ain’t no God! Paine says so! There ain’t no God!” Best fun of all when Jed Higgens tripped him and sent him face down in the mud; and then, while he lay there, whimpering like the old coward he was, Jed opened his grip, threw out half the clothes, and stuffed it with the empty whisky bottles that littered the station.

It might have gone on for a pleasurable long time, had not Mark Freeburg come along. Mark had only one arm; he had lost the other in the war, but the one was strong enough to send the young blades running and help the old man to his feet.

He stayed a while in New York, before going on to the farm at New Rochelle. His side was troubling him again, and his hands trembled worse than ever. He didn’t mind discomfort in other parts of his body, but if he could not control his hands, how could he write? And writing was the only thing left to him. In addition to that, the long arm of Napoleon reached across the Atlantic and touched him. Bonneville was in trouble with the new government; his paper had closed down, and he was afraid for his wife and children. Now he could not leave the country himself, but couldn’t Paine make some provision for Madame Bonneville and the children? Perhaps she could keep house for Paine? In France, under Napoleon, there was nothing left for a man who loved freedom, and it was said that Paine was a great man in America—

Yes, Paine wrote, he would do something.

So to add to other things, there was a woman and three small children on his hands.

It was all much too involved for him; his head ached with the strain of it, so many things to do, so many matters to attend to. Jefferson was running for the presidency again, and Paine, after a pet of childish rage, fought the issue out with himself and decided to support the president. Writing articles and pleas—but his hands shook so. Then the Bonnevilles came, and he shipped them off to the place in Borden-town. Too old to be bothered with children. He would forget something, and then walk round and round his little New York room, trying to recall what he had forgotten, and then go out into the street in slippers and dressing-gown, realizing what he had done only when the laughter and jeers of people woke him to it. There were the fits of depression when the brandy bottle was his only solace, and he drank until the glass slipped from his trembling fingers.

Then Madame Bonneville returned from Bordentown, bored, after so many years in Paris, by life in a rustic village where no one could speak a word of French. She took rooms in New York, and when Paine protested that after all he had given her a house, and that he was not wealthy enough to pay for an apartment too, she said:

“And who took care of you in Paris?”

He was old enough to be bullied now; he wanted peace; he was not too certain in his mind any more about what debts he owed to what people.

He tried to live alone on the New Rochelle place, but it was peopled with ghosts. When he lit a fire at night, to the accompaniment of brightly beating drums and shrill fifes, the past came marching out of the flames, ragged continentals with their long firelocks over their shoulders, shouting forlornly, Hello there, old Common Sense! It was more than he could stand; he didn’t want memories. He flung dishes at them and begged them, “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”

He had a stroke and tumbled down the narrow flight of stairs in the house. Crying softly, he lay at the bottom, not quite sure what had happened to him, calling aloud for help when he found he could not use his hands. There was no help; no one heard his cries. He lay on the floor until he had enough strength to climb into bed, and he lay there for a horrible week during which he somehow managed to keep alive.

Then he was afraid to be alone, and he got Madame Bonneville to come and keep house for him. She was little enough use; three children that ran like rabbits kept her in perpetual fear that they would be lost in the woods and kidnaped by Indians. Paine could not explain to her that there had been no Indians near New Rochelle for a hundred years. She was convinced; she alternated her fear with mournful longings for Paris, and to the sick old man she was more of a nuisance than a help.

“Go back to New York,” he finally told her. “I will take care of the bills.”

She had talked him into leaving a legacy for her and the children, and now she reminded him of it.

“It will be done, it will be done,” he said.

But he couldn’t be alone. He wasn’t afraid to die, but he feared the terrible, paralyzing effect of a stroke, and the doctor had assured him that it would come back sooner or later. So he found a hired man, named Derrick, who would work for him.

Derrick was jealously religious; religion was all his, his personal, dread possession. With the angels behind him, he came to work for the devil, his long, horse-like face wary and determined. He could do nothing well, not plow a furrow, not cut a tree, not split a rail, but that didn’t matter for his chief occupation here was watching Tom Paine, stealing manuscripts he imagined were written in consort with the devil, burning them, carrying tales, making remarks about his employer. He also stole his employer’s whisky and was frequently drunk.

At last, Paine discharged him; it was better to be alone. A few days later, Derrick returned, crawled up to a window where Paine was sitting, and let go with a large-bore musket, buckshot-loaded. He was drunk enough to miss the old man, but he shattered the window and filled the wall beyond with shot.

On his part, Paine was sorry that Derrick had missed. Better to have gone that way, quickly and painlessly, than to linger on here in an empty house. In the village, Derrick boasted about his feat until they were forced to arrest him, but Paine would not press any charges.

The old man feared the occasional trips he had to make into the village of New Rochelle. Not a mother had neglected to tell her child that Paine and the devil were in league, and when the thin-faced, bent old man came shuffling into town, he would attract as many children of all ages as the pied piper. It did not matter that he tried to be good to them, that he never chased them from his orchards, that he sometimes filled his pockets with candy in an attempt to bribe them away from their torments; that was to no avail, for what other game presented such fascinating possibilities as baiting old Tom Paine? Throw enough mud, rocks, and sticks at him and you could get him to lose his temper, and then you could lead him a merry chase. And there were wonderful rhymes you could sing as you danced out of reach, such as:

“Benedict Arnold and Simon Girty,

They were false to flag and country,

But compared to Paine they weren’t bad,

He played false with Washington and Gad.”

or

“Make a revolution, blood and flame,

I’m the one who does it, my name is Paine.

I should have gone to the guillotine,

Too bad I didn’t—I’m just too mean.”

And never a grown-up to reprimand you, but only to say, “Give it to him, give it to him,” as they smoked their pipes and looked on.

In New Rochelle, there was no hope of an old comrade coming to his aid. This was Tory country during the war, and fiercely anti-Jefferson now, as most of Westchester County was. The villagers had not fought in the war; their neutrality swayed the comfortable way, and they gave all the aid they could to the British and to the Tory counterrevolutionaries called Rogers’ Rangers. That they had not forgotten the war was proven to Paine when he came into town to vote in the 1806 election.

The election supervisors were a small Tory clique, and when they saw Paine shuffling into town on registration day, the crowd of children buzzing at his heels, they looked at each other and nodded and smiled. Paine walked more proudly than usual; everything else gone, he could still cast a vote for principles he believed in. A mild function, an anonymous function, crosses on a piece of paper, but nevertheless the representation that he had made the guiding function of his life.

Standing on line, he closed his ears to the coarse remarks flung at him, and when finally his turn came said strongly:

“Thomas Paine, sir!”

“And what do you want here?”

“This is the board of elections, isn’t it? I’m here to register.”

They smiled at each other, and told him, “Only citizens vote.”

Paine shook his head. “I am Thomas Paine,” he repeated, his twisted eyes wrinkled querulously.

“So we are given to understand. However, you are not a citizen of the United States of America.”

The old man shook his head, bewilderment making him cringe into his years. Everyone laughed at the thought that this trembling old man was the murderous revolutionist, the diabolical antichrist. See how dirty he is, snuff stains all over his shirt, his stockings wrinkled and down at the knees, his hands shaking so! Patiently, the chief supervisor explained to him:

“We do not register foreigners, only citizens. You have no right to vote and you are holding up the line.”

Reaching back into his memory for quiet legal arguments, for reason in a thing so obvious, for some clarification of this horrible mistake, the old man said haltingly, “But Congress gave citizenship to all soldiers of the revolution—”

“You were never a soldier of the revolution,” the supervisor smiled.

“But I am Paine, Thomas Paine, don’t you understand?”

“I will thank you to go, and make no further disturbance.”

“But I must vote—I must vote. Don’t you understand that I must vote. It is my right.”

The crowd roared with laughter, and the supervisor, still patient, pointed out, “Neither Gouverneur Morris nor General Washington considered you an American citizen. Are we to go over their heads? Really, sir—”

“I won’t stand such injustice!” the old man cried shrilly. “I’ll prosecute you!”

“Call the constable,” the supervisor said, his patience gone now. “We still have room in jail for an old rascal.”

“Jail—not jail,” the old man whispered, broken now. “Not jail any more.”

And with that, he turned away and shuffled back along the street, the children dancing about him once more.

He had enough of New Rochelle—let the farm go to the devil. There was nothing left, nothing at all, and the only thing he wanted now was to die. Let it come quickly; let it be over with; this world was a strange place that he did not know at all, and he was a frightened, sick old man.

He went back to New York, and life prolonged itself, and he moved from one miserable lodging house to another. He drank too much; he took too much snuff, and about his appearance he cared nothing at all. A dirty old man, an unshaven old man—what did it matter? He had not even enough spirit left to shake a stick at the ever-present, tormenting children.

He sometimes asked himself, plaintively, “Is this God’s revenge?” He, for whom values had always been firm as iron, found them shifting and relaxing now. “Have I done wrong to believe in Him in an unbelieving world? Have I done wrong in saying that His name must not be profaned, that He is the top of all man’s aspirations?”

Sometimes, briefly, a spark of the old Paine appeared, as when a man called Fraser forged a recantation of the so-called heresies in The Age of Reason. Then the old man challenged him and brought him to law. Paine might decay and die, but recant?—and on the one work for which he had suffered most, his plea for a gentle, reasonable worship of the Almighty. Never that, not even from this dirty old man who had only one thing left, his name. Fraser was not much among Paine’s enemies; he confessed and pleaded for mercy, and the old man said,

“… write no more concerning Thomas Paine. I am satisfied with your acknowledgment—try something more worthy of a man.”

But the sparks were fewer now. A stroke felled him again, and he lay on the broken ruin of a whisky bottle until he was found.

He was dying, and he knew it, and it occurred to him that he would not lie anywhere but in some nameless field of beggars. To Willett Hicks, a liberal Quaker preacher, he said, “Let me lie in the Quaker burial-ground,” adding plaintively, “I have never done anything unbecoming of a Quaker. They will do what they want with me when I am dead; they’ll deny me a little bit of ground.”

Hicks said he didn’t think it was possible. One man might be sympathetic to Paine, but refer the matter to a committee, and it was doomed to failure.

“Just one small favor after I am dead,” Paine pleaded. “My father was a good Quaker, and so was my mother. I never asked anything of the Quakers until now. In the name of charity—”

Hicks said he would try, but it turned out as he had anticipated. The Quakers denied Paine burial, and so did various other sects whom Hicks sounded out. When Madame Bonneville came to visit him, Paine complained to her:

“They deny me even a little bit of ground. They will strew my bones all over, like rubbish.”

He was not a bad old man, Madame Bonneville thought, for all his faults and such stubborn insanity as not wanting to come down from his room to see the great Bonaparte. Why didn’t they leave him alone and stop tormenting him?

“You will be buried on your own farm,” she said.

“It’s good earth,” he reflected, trying to gather his thoughts. “American earth—that would be all right. But the land will be sold; they’ll dig up my bones and sell them.”

“The land won’t be sold,” Madame Bonneville told him, thinking that anything you told an old man who was dying to comfort him was a blessing.

There was nothing but pain now—in his side where it had become infected during his stay in the Luxembourg, in his head, everywhere. A man dies so slowly. Madame Bonneville got him a nurse, but the nurse was a deeply religious woman and let it be known all about that Tom Paine was living his last hours. Thus began a pilgrimage; for what a splendid thing it would be to hear Paine denounce The Age of Reason on his deathbed!

One and all they came, Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians—they had not read his book, yet they came to fight the book and the devil.

“Renounce it! Renounce God and goodness and hope, for you are dying! Renounce mankind!”

Ministers, priests, pastors, fathers, nuns—they crept into his room, aided by the nurse, who had been divinely placed in this holy position. The old warrior was dying, and what had they or anyone to fear! The horns of the angels had pealed over Concord and Lexington, but here was only the rustle of stiff, black garments. If he called weakly for aid, his comrades could not hear him, for they were dead or far away, crossing the mountains and the plains, driving their oxen and their covered wagons, going to make the land and the world that was the dream, the handwork, and the suffering of Tom Paine. The ones in black crouched over him; they darkened and pushed away the little sunlight. They screamed, “Recant!” Ladies came to do their bit of good, dressed in proper ebony. Even the doctor, bending low, prodded him, “Mr. Paine, do you hear me? There is still time, there is still hope. Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

“Do you wish to believe?”

“Do you recant?”

“Do you renounce?”

“You are a dirty old man, you are all alone. Give up, give up!”

If there was a moment of peace, as there was bound to be, early in the morning and late at night, the nurse read in ringing tones from the Bible. This was a crusade; come, all ye faithful!

And then he no longer heard their voices, their prodding, their torments, their pleas that he should be weak, he whose strength was the strength of storied heroes, of the gods of old. He had peace; he had his comrades by his side; he stood among the men of good will, those who came before him and those who came after him.

Such was the funeral procession which accompanied his body to the farm at New Rochelle: Madame Bonneville, her children, two Negroes, and the Quaker preacher, Willett Hicks, those seven and no more. But it was enough; it was the whole world.

At one point during their journey up to Westchester, the driver stopped the coach to rest the horses, and a bystander called out to Hicks:

“Whose funeral?”

“Tom Paine’s.”

“Well,” the stranger grinned, “if there is such a business as purgatory, he’ll get his share before the devil lets go of him.”

“On that score,” Hicks mused, “I would sooner take my chance with Tom Paine than with any man in New York.”

A few of the townsfolk had gathered to watch the burial. They snickered at the few words Hicks said over the grave. The coachman was grateful for the fine June day; he didn’t often get a ride out into the country. Hicks asked Madame Bonneville whether there was any provision in the will for a tombstone, and she said, yes, she would have it put up as soon as it could be cut. She also intended to plant some willows and cypresses around the grave, it looked so bare. She showed Hicks the slip of paper upon which Paine had written his own epitaph:

“Thomas Paine, Author of Common Sense.”

“That’s enough,” Hicks said. “That’s enough for any man. How old was he?”

“Seventy-two, I think.”

It was the eighth of June, 1809.

But it was not enough for the good people of New Rochelle that he had been buried in unhallowed ground. They invaded the farm and ripped the branches from the trees Madame Bonneville had planted, and sold them for souvenirs. They hacked pieces off the tombstone; they pulled up the few flowers that had grown.

Ten years later, a man named William Cobbett had a scheme. He dug up Paine’s bones and took them to England, intending to exhibit them in various cities. But the British government refused to permit this last, crowning infamy, and the bones disappeared somewhere in England.

So today, no one knows where Paine lies, and that, perhaps, is best, for the world was his village.

THE END