Staymaking seems then to have lost all attractions for him, for in 1761 he succeeded in obtaining the modest appointment of supernumerary officer in the Excise, and was stationed in this his native town. How _very_ modest that post really was may be sufficiently explained when it is said that the pay was £50 a year, and find your own horse! If that was an advance upon his earlier employment—why, then, staymaking must have been a poor thing. Paine does not seem to have taken his duties very seriously. Could any one, at the price? So, after he had been transferred to stations at Grantham and Alford, he was at length, in 1765, dismissed for neglect. The neglect was rather serious, consisting as it did in filling up returns of examinations he had not made. Two years of wandering followed. Staymaking at Diss and ushering in London filled in the time until 1767, when by some strange chance he secured another appointment in the Excise. This billet would have taken him to Grampound, in Cornwall, but that was too far West, and so he held off until the following year, when a similar post offered at Lewes. There he lodged with a tobacconist, who died the following year, and two years later Paine married his late landlord’s daughter. She and her mother opened a small grocery business, and Paine contributed his small share towards keeping up the establishment. But it was not in the scheme of life laid down by the Fates for Paine that he should be allowed to jog comfortably on through an obscure provincial existence of this humdrum nature. He became a noted figure in local political debates, and in 1772 the excisemen, who had long chafed under a combination of arduous work and small pay, found in Paine a champion who could display their grievances to advantage. He wrote and issued a pamphlet, setting forth their circumstances and demands, and eventually found himself dismissed from the service. He petitioned the Board of Excise for reinstatement, but they had no use for firebrands, and his appeals were disregarded. Meanwhile, domestic differences had been at work, and that lack of conjugal agreement it has been left for modern times to gracefully term “incompatability of temperament” had caused a more or less amicable separation. This general upheaval and ruination of Paine’s little world sent him drifting to London, where he met Dr. Franklin, who found him eager to try his luck in what were then the North American Colonies, and so gave him introductions to Philadelphia folks who might be of use. At Philadelphia he landed, accordingly, in 1774, and presently found his way into an editorial chair, at a salary of £50 a year, which we may perhaps look upon as an advance, because he certainly had not to support a horse, as well as himself, out of it, as in old Excise days.