The older De Bonneville boy was Benjamin, known affectionately by his parents and Paine as “Bebia.”  He was destined to become distinguished in the Civil War—­Gen. Benjamin de Bonneville, of high military and patriotic honours.

I said we couldn’t keep to Greenwich—­we have travelled to France and back again already!

You may find the house if you care to look for it—­the very same house kept by Mrs. Ryder, where Thomas Paine lived more than a century ago.  So humble and shabby it is you might pass it by with no more notice than you would pass a humble and shabby wayfarer.  Its age and picturesqueness do not arrest the eye; for it isn’t the sort of old house which by quaint lines and old-world atmosphere tempt the average artist or lure the casual poet to its praise.  It is just a little old wooden building of another day, where people of modest means were wont to live.

The caretaker there probably does not know anything about the august memory that with him inhabits the dilapidated rooms.  He doubtless fails to appreciate the honour of placing his hand upon the selfsame polished mahogany stair rail which our immortal “infidel’s” hand once pressed, or the rare distinction of reading his evening paper at the selfsame window where, with his head upon his hand, that Other was wont to read too, once upon a time.

Ugly, dingy rooms they are in that house, but glorified by association.  There is, incidentally, a mantelpiece which anyone might envy, though now buried in barbarian paint.  There are gable windows peering out from the shingled roof. [Illustration:  GROVE COURT]

Some day the Thomas Paine Association will probably buy it, undertake the long-forgotten national obligation, and prevent it from crumbling to dust as long as ever they can.

The caretaker keeps pets—­cats and kittens and dogs and puppies.  Once he kept pigeons too, but the authorities disapproved, he told me.

“Ah, well,” I said, “the authorities never have approved of things in this house.”

He thought me quite mad.

Let us walk down the street toward that delicious splash of green—­like a verdant spray thrown up from some unseen river of trees.  There is, in reality, no river of trees; it is only Christopher Street Triangle, elbowing Sheridan Square.  Subway construction is going on around us, but there clings still an old-world feeling.  Ah, here we are—­59 Grove Street.  It is a modest but a charming little red-brick house with a brass knocker and an air of unpretentious, small-scale prosperity.  It has only been built during the last half-century, but it stands on the identical plot of ground where Paine’s other Greenwich residence once stood.  It wasn’t Grove Street then; in fact, it wasn’t a street at all, but an open lot with one lone frame house in the middle of it.  Here Mme. de Bonneville brought Thomas Paine when his age and ill health necessitated greater comforts than Mrs. Ryder’s lodgings could afford.