John Lamb, the father, had got nearly to his dotage and quite to uselessness, and was pensioned off by his master about this period. The elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, had grown into a broad, burly, jovial bachelor, wedded to his own ways; living an easy life apart from them all; “marching in quite an opposite direction,” as his brother kindly puts it--speaking, as was his wont, not without tenderness for him. He contributed nothing to the support of the family, and Mary added but little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by dress-making on a small scale--a trade she had taught herself. In her article on needlework, written in 1814, for the _British Lady’s Magazine_, she says: “In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a livelihood.” And so it seemed needful that the boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving Christ’s, should get to work to eke out the family’s scanty income. John Lamb had a comfortable position in the South Sea House. It stood where now stands the Oriental Bank, at the end of Threadneedle Street, as you turn up into Bishopsgate Within: “its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars.” In his essay entitled “The South Sea House,” Lamb has drawn the picture of the place within: its “stately porticos, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces; ... the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors; ... huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams; and soundings of the Bay of Panama!” All “long since dissipated or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.” Here Charles was given a desk, and here he worked, but at what work and with what wage we do not know. It was not for many months, however, for he soon received his appointment in the East India House through the kindness of Samuel Salt--the final kindness that came to the family from their aged well-doer; for he died during that year, 1792. The young accountant had but little taste for, and still less knowledge of, the mercantile mysteries over which he was set to toil. He knew less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks’ standing, he said in mature manhood; and a map of old Ortelius was as authentic as Arrowsmith to him. Of history and chronology he possessed some vague points, such as he could not help picking up in the course of his miscellaneous reading; but he never deliberately sat down to study any chronicle of any country! His friend Manning once, with great painstaking, got him to think that he understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave him over in despair at the second. And, toil as toughly as he might over his accounts, he had to own, after years of adding, that “I think I lose £100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up my accounts.”