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.
Here he spent some peaceful months with only a few visitors; but those were faithful ones. One was Willett Hicks, the Quaker preacher, always a staunch friend; another was John Wesley Jarvis, the American painter—the same artist who later made the great man's death mask.
It was Jarvis who said: "He devoted his whole life to the attainment of two objects—rights of man and freedom of conscience."
And, by the bye, Dr. Conway has declared that "his 'Rights of Man' is now the political constitution of England, his 'Age of Reason' is the growing constitution of its Church."
In passing I must once again quote Mr. van der Weyde, who once said to me: "I often wonder just what share Mary Wollstonecraft had with her 'Rights of Women'—in the inspiration of Paine's 'Rights of Man.' He and she, you know, were close friends."