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On his return to Ayrshire he renewed his relations with Jean Armour, whom he ultimately married, took the farm of Ellisland near Dumfries, having meanwhile taken lessons in the duties of an exciseman, as a line to fall back upon should farming again prove unsuccessful. At Ellisland his society was cultivated by the local gentry.
"We ought, by rights, to give these things to the revenue officer." "Yes," I said, "but if we do that, we shall have to say how they came, and why they came, and then perhaps the exciseman will get a clue, and we shall have brought the night-riders into trouble."
The exciseman had jumped to his feet at Donald's first outburst. But he had underrated his man, and now it was too late. To attempt to draw a pistol now would be fatal that was a movement with which he should have opened the affair.
After trying various occupations, including those of schoolmaster and exciseman, and having separated from his wife, he went in 1774 to America where, in 1776, he pub. his famous pamphlet, Common Sense, in favour of American independence. He served in the American army, and also held some political posts, including that of sec. to a mission to France in 1781.
"Give yourself up, and all will be well! I've looked for you far and wide. At last I find you. Come, Le Mierre, don't be a fool about this. It will only be a fine, and perhaps not even that, if you give up the other chaps." But the master of Orvillière was not to be reasoned with. He was in a towering rage. He wrenched the pistol from the saddle. He fired it at the exciseman. It missed him.
The exciseman, with a waggish sneer, expressed his apprehension of Trunnion's death, in consequence of which the patereroes might be discharged with an equivocal intent, either as signals of his lady's sorrow or rejoicing.
Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." See ante, i, 405. Campbell, who was an exciseman, had in July, 1769, caught a favourite servant of Lord Eglintoune in smuggling 80 gallons of rum in one of his master's carts. This, he maintains, led to an ill-feeling.
We were no sooner informed of this piece of finesse, than the exciseman, who had been silent hitherto, began to open with a malicious grin: "Ay, ay this is an old trick of Shuffle; I could not help smiling when he talked of treating. You must know this is a very curious fellow. He picked up some scraps of learning while he served young Lord Trifte at the university.
"That's conjecture; for Dignum never let on so far. But what is known for certain is that Exciseman Jones, who were as daring and determined as his enemy p'r'aps more so for some reason was in the chimney, on to a grating in which he had managed to lower hisself from the roof; and that he could, if given time, have scrambled up again with difficulty, but was debarred from going lower.
Some hints came to him from Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang from Paine's own inventive brain, and all of them are presented by the whilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were a Chancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliament in the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "these instruments of civil torture."
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