New Year's, 1828, found the naturalist in Manchester, where but a few days before he had received the fifth and last number of his plates for 1827 and expressed himself well pleased with it. While returning to London by coach, he consented to take a hand at cards to accommodate his fellow passengers, but declined to play for money; "I never play," he confessed, "unless obliged to by circumstances; I feel no pleasure in the game, and long for other occupation." "I missed my snuff," he added, and whenever his hands went into his pockets in search of the box, he "discovered the strength of habit thus acting without thought"; but he remembered a resolution he had formed to give up the habit and stuck to it for a time at least; doubtless, like his later friend, John Bachman, he reformed more than once, for in a letter to Victor Audubon, of November 5, 1846, Bachman added this postscript: "To Audubon: The snuff—the snuff, it is here! I have just taken a pinch, and the ladies have blown _you_ up—sky-high, for teaching me such a bad practice; I say, however, that you beat me all to pieces in that art." The first winter in London dragged heavily for the naturalist, who exclaimed in January, 1828: "How long am I to be confined in this immense jail"; when Daniel Lizars reported from Edinburgh the loss of four of his subscribers, he writes, "I am dull as a beetle. Why do I dislike London? Is it because the constant evidence of the contrast between the rich and the poor is a constant torment to me, or is it because of its size and crowd? I know not, but I long for sights and sounds of a different nature," such, we might add, as the flocks of wild duck which were occasionally seen from Regent's Park as they passed over the city and made him more homesick than ever. Audubon hated the city quite as cordially as Charles Lamb ever affected to detest the country, and when leaving it, afoot or by stage, it seemed as if he could never be rid of it. "What a place is London," he would say, but naïvely add: "many persons live there solely because they like it." On February 4, 1828, Audubon was elected to membership in the Linnæan Society, and in November he presented it with a copy of his work, which was then well under way. This was noticed in a letter to Swainson, written on November 7, when no acknowledgment of the gift had then been received; and he mentioned also the sale of his picture of "Blue Jays" for ten guineas. At a meeting of the Linnæan Society not long after his election, copies of Selby's _Illustrations of British Ornithology_ and of his own work were placed side by side for inspection, and "very unfair comparisons were drawn between the two"; had Selby, Audubon reflected, been given "the same opportunities that my curious life has granted me, his work would have been far superior to mine"; "I supported him," he added, "to the best of my power."