There are gable windows
peering out from the shingled roof. [Illustration: GROVE COURT]
Some day the Thomas Paine Association will probably buy it, undertake
the long-forgotten national obligation, and prevent it from crumbling
to dust as long as ever they can.
The caretaker keeps pets--cats and kittens and dogs and puppies. Once
he kept pigeons too, but the authorities disapproved, he told me.
"Ah, well," I said, "the authorities never have approved of things in
this house."
He thought me quite mad.
Let us walk down the street toward that delicious splash of
green--like a verdant spray thrown up from some unseen river of trees.
There is, in reality, no river of trees; it is only Christopher Street
Triangle, elbowing Sheridan Square. Subway construction is going on
around us, but there clings still an old-world feeling. Ah, here we
are--59 Grove Street. It is a modest but a charming little red-brick
house with a brass knocker and an air of unpretentious, small-scale
prosperity. It has only been built during the last half-century, but
it stands on the identical plot of ground where Paine's other
Greenwich residence once stood.
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