one, and served them with all the fierceness of party-hate.  A shower of abusive missiles rattled incessantly about his ears.  However thick-skinned a man may be, and protected over all by the oes triplex of self-sufficiency, he cannot escape being wounded by furious and incessant attacks.  Paine felt keenly the neglect of his former friends, who avoided him, when they did not openly cut him.  Mr. Jefferson, it is true, asked him to dinners, and invited the British minister to meet him; at least, the indignant Anglo-Federal editors said so.  Perhaps he offered him an office.  If he did, Paine refused it, preferring “to serve as a disinterested volunteer.”  Poor old man! his services were no longer of much use to anybody.  The current of American events had swept past him, leaving him stranded, a broken fragment of a revolutionary wreck.

When the nine days of wonder had expired in Washington, and the inhabitants had grown tired of staring at Paine and of pelting him with abuse, he betook himself to New York.  On his way thither, he met with an adventure which shows the kind of martyrdom suffered by this political and religious heretic.  He had stopped at Bordentown, in New Jersey, to look at a small place he owned there, and to visit an old friend and correspondent, Colonel Kirkbride.  When he departed, the Colonel drove him over to Trenton to take the stage-coach.  But in Trenton the Federal and Religious party had the upperhand, and when Paine applied at the booking-office for a seat to New York the agent refused to sell him one.  Moreover, a crowd collected about his lodgings, who groaned dismally when he drove away with his friend, while a band of musicians, provided for the occasion, played the Rogue’s March.

Among the editorial celebrities of 1803, James Cheetham, in New York, was almost as famous as Duane of the “Aurora.”  Cheetham, like many of his contemporaries, Gray, Carpenter, Callender, and Duane himself, was a British subject.  He was a hatter in his native land; but a turn for politics ruined his business and made expatriation convenient.  In the United States, he had become the editor of the “American Citizen,” and was at that time busily engaged in attacking the Federalists and Burr’s “Little Band,” for their supposed attempt to elect Mr. Burr in the place of Mr. Jefferson.  To Cheetham, accordingly, Paine wrote, requesting him to engage lodgings at Lovett’s, afterwards the City Hotel.  He sent for Cheetham, on the evening of his arrival.  The journalist obeyed the summons immediately.  This was the first interview between Paine and the man who was to hang, draw, and quarter his memory in a biography.  This libellous performance was written shortly after Paine’s death.  It was intended as a peace-offering to the English government.  The ex-hatter had made up his mind to return home, and he wished to prove the sincerity of his conversion from radicalism by trampling on the remains of its high-priest.