This office, which it was Wordsworth's pleasure to speak of as "a little one," yielded, I believe, somewhere about £500 a year. Gradually, even _that_, with all former sources of income, became insufficient; which ought not to surprise anybody; for a son at Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, would spend, at the least, £300 per annum; and there were other children. Still, it is wrong to say that it _had_ become insufficient; as usual, it had not come to that; but, on the first symptoms arising that it soon _would_ come to that, somebody, of course, had notice to consider himself a sort of nuisance-elect;--in this case, it was the distributor of stamps for the county of Cumberland. His district was absurdly large; and what so reasonable as that he should submit to a Polish partition of his profits--no, not Polish; for, on reflection, such a partition neither was nor could be attempted with regard to an actual incumbent. But then, since people had such consideration for him as not to remodel the office so long as he lived, on the other hand, the least he could do for "people" in return--so as to show his sense of this consideration--was not to trespass on so much goodness longer than necessary. Accordingly, here, as in all cases before, the _Deus ex machinâ_ who invariably interfered when any _nodus_ arose in Wordsworth's affairs, such as could be considered _vindice dignus_, caused the distributor to begone into a region where no stamps are wanted, about the very month, or so, when an additional £400 per annum became desirable. This, or perhaps more, was understood to have been added, by the new arrangement, to the Westmoreland distributorship; the small towns of Keswick and Cockermouth, together with the important one of Whitehaven, being severed, under this remodelling, from their old dependency on Cumberland (to which geographically they belonged), and transferred to the small territory of rocky Westmoreland, the sum total of whose inhabitants was at that time not much above 50,000; of which number, one-third, or nearly so, was collected into the only important town of Kendal; but, of the other two-thirds, a larger proportion was a simple agricultural or pastoral population than anywhere else in England. In Westmoreland, therefore, it may be supposed that the stamp demand could not have been so great, not perhaps by three-quarters, as in Cumberland; which, besides having a population at least three times as large, had more and larger towns. The result of this new distribution was something that approached to an equalization of the districts--giving to each, as was said, in round terms, a thousand a year.