much." In July, 1809, just after Paine's death, Cheetham wrote Barlow for information concerning Paine, "useful in illustrating his character," and said: "He was a great drunkard here, and Mr. M., a merchant of this city, who lived with him when he was arrested by order of Robespierre, tells me he was intoxicated when that event happened." Barlow, recently returned from Europe, was living just out of Washington; he could know nothing of Cheetham's treachery, and fell into his trap; he refuted the story of "Mr. M.," of course, but took it for granted that a supposed republican editor would tell the truth about Paine in New York, and wrote of the dead author as having "a mind, though strong enough to bear him up and to rise elastic under the heaviest hand of oppression, yet unable to endure the contempt of his former friends and fellow-laborers, the rulers of the country that had received his first and greatest services; a mind incapable of looking down with serene compassion, as it ought, on the rude scoffs of their imitators, a new generation that knows him not; a mind that shrinks from their society, and unhappily seeks refuge in low company, or looks for consolation in the sordid, solitary bottle, etc."! Barlow, misled as he was, well knew Paine's nature, and that if he drank to excess it was not from appetite, but because of ingratitude and wrong. The man was not a stock or a stone. If any can find satisfaction in the belief that Paine found no Christian in America so merciful as rum, they may perhaps discover some grounds for it in a brief period of his sixty-ninth year. While living in the house of Carver, Paine was seized with an illness that threatened to be mortal, and from which he never fully recovered. It is probable that he was kept alive for a time by spirits during the terrible time, but this ceased when in the latter part of 1806 he left Carver's to live with Jarvis. In the spring of 1808 he resided in the house of Mr. Hitt, a baker, in Broome Street, and there remained ten months. Mr. Hitt reports that Paine's weekly supply then--his seventy-second year, and his last--was three quarts of rum per week. * Todd's "Joel Barlow," p. 236. The "Mr. M." was one Murray, an English speculator in France, where he never resided with Paine at all. After Paine had left Carver's he became acquainted with more people. The late Judge Tabor's recollections have been sent me by his son, Mr. Stephen Tabor, of Independence, Iowa.