ces, his experiments
and his achievements, is like reading the biographies of a score of
different busy men!

He was born of Quaker parentage, at Thetford, Norfolk, in England, on
January 29, 1737, and pursued many avocations before he found his true
vocation--that of a world liberator, and apostle of freedom and human
rights. One of his most sympathetic commentators, H.M. Brailsford,
says of him:

"His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions
belong to romance.... In his spirit of adventure, in his
passion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic.
Paine thought in prose and acted epics. He drew horizons on
paper and pursued the infinite in deeds."

Let us see where this impulse of romance and adventure led him; it was
into strange enough paths at first!

He was a mere boy--fifteen or sixteen, if I remember accurately--when
the lure of the sea seized him. It is reported that he signed up on a
privateer (the Captain of which was appropriately called Death!),
putting out from England, and sailed with her piratical crew for a
year. This was doubtless adventurous enough, but young Thomas already
wanted adventure of a different and a higher order. He came back and
went into his Quaker father's business--which was that of a staymaker,
of all things! He got his excitement by studying _astronomy_!

Then he became an exciseman--what was sometimes called "gauger"--and
was speedily cashiered for negligence. Anyone may have three guesses
as to his reported next ambition. More than one historian has declared
that he wished to take orders in the Church of England. This is,
however, extremely unlikely. In any case, he changed his mind in time,
and was again taken on as exciseman. Likewise, he was again dismissed.
This time they fired him for advocating higher wages and writing a
pamphlet on the subject. The reform fever had caught him, you
perceive, and he was nevermore free from it, to the day of his death.

He was a brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor. Brailsford
says that his inventions were "partly useful, partly whimsical." They
would be, of course. They included a crane, a planing-machine, a
smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor--besides his really big and
notable invention of the first iron bridge.

[Illustration: 59, GROVE STREET. On the site of the house where Thomas
Paine died.]

But that came later. Before leaving England, in addition to his other
and var