"Then it must be very rusty," answered Paine. In Philadelphia his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush never came near him. "His principles," wrote Rush to Cheetham, "avowed in his 'Age of Reason,' were so offensive to me that I did not wish to renew my intercourse with him." Paine made arrangements for the reception of his bridge models at Peale's Museum, but if he met any old friend there no mention of it appears. Most of those who had made up the old circle--Franklin, Rittenhouse, Muhlenberg--were dead, some were away in Congress; but no doubt Paine saw George Clymer. However, he did not stay long in Philadelphia, for he was eager to reach the spot he always regarded as his home, Bordentown. And there, indeed, his hope, for a time, seemed to be fulfilled It need hardly be said that his old friend Colonel Kirkbride gave him hearty welcome. John Hall, Paine's bridge mechanician, "never saw him jollier," and he was full of mechanical "whims and schemes" they were to pursue together. Jefferson was candidate for the presidency, and Paine entered heartily into the canvass; which was not prudent, but he knew nothing of prudence. The issue not only concerned an old friend, but was turning on the question of peace with France. On March 12th he writes against the "federalist" scheme for violently seizing New Orleans. At a meeting in April, over which Colonel Kirkbride presides, Paine drafts a reply to an attack on Jefferson's administration, circulated in New York. On April 21 st he writes the refutation of an attack on Jefferson, _apropos_ of the national vessel offered for his return, which had been coupled with a charge that Paine had proposed to the Directory an invasion of America! In June he writes about his bridge models (then at Peale's Museum, Philadelphia), and his hope to span the Delaware and the Schuylkill with iron arches. Here is a letter written to Jefferson from Bordentown (August 2d) containing suggestions concerning the beginning of government in Louisiana, from which it would appear that Paine's faith in the natural inspiration of _vox populi_ was still imperfect: "I take it for granted that the present inhabitants know little or nothing of election and representation as constituting government. They are therefore not in an immediate condition to exercise those powers, and besides this they are perhaps too much under the influence of their priests to be sufficiently free.