They had need, just then, of the brightness of the young girl’s presence, for they were saddened--albeit needlessly so for all the comfort he had brought to them--by the death of their brother John. Mary’s illnesses were growing more frequent and more prolonged; and Charles was chafing more and more under his unending drudgery at the desk. In 1822 he had already written to Wordsworth: “I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition.” And once he gave irate vent to a great outburst, dear to all but to the shop-keeping soul: “Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and links of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and getting a knowledge of the face of the globe; and rotting the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks! Vale.” And again: “Oh, that I were kicked out of Leadenhall, with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!” It was in April, 1825, that his wish was gratified, and his waiting brought to an end, in this very Colebrook cottage. He had nerved himself at length to offer his resignation to the Directors of the East India Company, and was surprised and delighted--having been kept a few weeks in suspense--by the proposal “that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary--a magnificent offer. I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home--forever.” To Wordsworth he wrote, on April 6, 1825: “I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three--to have three times as much real time--time that is my own--in it!”