Most especially will your acceptance of the present office (which is the second subject of which your head is full) be your only certain opportunity for revisiting Italy, which is what I have more at heart than anything else. And your acceptance is indispensably necessary, unless you have the abominable and unfilial desire to bring scorn and derision on your anxious father--on that father who has sacrificed every hour of his life to his children to bring them credit and honour. I am not in a position to pay my debts, which now amount in all to one thousand florins, unless you lighten the payment by the receipt of your salary. I can then certainly pay off four hundred florins a year, and live comfortably with you two. I should like, if it is the will of God, to live a few years more, and to pay my debts, and then you may, if you choose, run your head against the wall at once. But no! your heart is good. You are not wicked, only thoughtless--it will all come! This was not to be withstood. Wolfgang wrote that he would set off on December 9, but he still declined to travel the shortest way (December 3, 1778): "I must tell you what a good opportunity I have for a travelling companion next Wednesday--no other than the Bishop of Kaysersheim. One of my friends mentioned me to him; he remembered my name, and expressed great pleasure at the idea of travelling with me; he is a thoroughly kind, good man, although he is a priest and a prelate. So that I shall go viä Kaysersheim, instead of Stuttgart." The farewell to Mannheim was a sad one, both to Mozart and his friends. Madame Cannabich, who had earned the right to be considered as his best and truest friend, and who placed implicit confidence in him, was specially sorrowful; she refused to rise for his early departure, feeling unequal to the leave-taking, and he crept silently away that he might not add to her distress. He was loth to give up his monodrama: "I am now writing," he says (December 3, 1778), "to please Herr von Gemmingen and myself, the first act of the declamatory opera which I was to have finished here; as it is, I shall {THE RETURN HOME.} (78) take it with me, and go on with it at home; my eagerness for this kind of composition is uncontrollable."[7]