At the end of this year he became friendly with the family of Skepper, including the widowed Mrs. Mary Clarke, then 36 years old, who lived at Oulton Hall, near Lowestoft, in Suffolk. With or through them he met the Rev. Francis Cunningham, Vicar of St. Margaret's, Lowestoft, who had married a sister of the Quaker banker, Joseph John Gurney, and through the offices of these two, Borrow was invited to go before the British and Foreign Bible Society, as a candidate for employment in some branch of the Society's work where his knowledge of languages would be useful. He walked to London for the purpose in December, 1832. The Society was satisfied and sent him back to Norwich to learn the Manchu-Tartar language. There he wrote a letter, which, if we take Dr. Knapp's word for it, was "a sort of recantation of the Taylorism of 1824." Being now near thirty, and perhaps having his worst "horrors" behind him, or at least having reason to think so if he was already fond of Mrs. Clarke, whom he afterwards married, it was easy for him to fall into the same way of speaking as these good and kindly people, and to abuse Buddhism, which he did not understand, for their delectation. Mrs. Clarke had four or five hundred pounds a year of her own, and one child, a daughter, then about fourteen years old. Perhaps it was natural that he should remember then, as he did later, the words of the cheerful and forgetful wise man: "I have been young and now am grown old, yet never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread."