this time. The proud and imposing
superstructure stands on a basis fit and substantial, but it rises out
of the depths of mystery. And what little we do know of him prior to
this time, aside from the great fact of his birth, is only a series of
minor facts, with great blanks not even capable of being filled up by
the imagination.

When a lad he went to school, but how long he went, or with what
proficiency he studied, nobody knows. At sixteen he went aboard a
privateer, but how long he served, or what made him quit the service,
nobody knows. At twenty-seven he enters the employ of the English
government as an exciseman, but was dismissed in a little over a year,
nobody knows why. He now teaches school in London a year, but nobody
knows with what success, or what were his accomplishments. He now quits
London and letters, and the society of the learned, to return to the
same petty office from which he had been dismissed, and for the trifling
salary of less than fifty pounds a year. This office he now holds eight
years more. Only a solitary ray of light illuminates this long period,
when in the full tide of life. The chronicler renders it insignificant
by a single dash of the pen. It is closed with another dismissal and
dismal mystery. He now forever separates from his wife upon _amicable
terms_, nobody knows why. During their after lives they neither of them
marry, and never speak disrespectfully of each other. He leaves her all
the property, and often sends her money during his after life. This
obscure and twice dismissed English exciseman, it is said, now goes to
talk with Benjamin Franklin, minister at the court of St. James, for
several of the colonies; and, by what means nobody knows, obtains
letters of the highest commendation, as an introduction to America, from
her greatest and most honored citizen. A few months afterward Benjamin
Franklin places in the hands of Mr. Paine important documents, for him
to write a history of the political troubles and a defense of the
colonies. A mighty work, worthy of a greater than Franklin! These facts
stagger credulity. An obscure English exciseman, whose life is yet a
blank, who has never been an author, save perhaps of some fugitive
pamphlet to demand more pay for excise officers, is _introduced_ to
America, and is _solicited_ and _intrusted_ by America's greatest
writer, thinker, patriot, and statesman, to do America's greatest work,
and that work, too, which shall decide for