Audubon worked untiringly. He wrote all day long, and "so full was my mind of birds and their habits, that in my sleep I continually dreamed of birds." The "Birds of America" received good reviews in "Blackwood's Magazine," and elsewhere. Audubon said, "I have balanced my accounts with the 'Birds of America,' and the whole business is really wonderful; forty thousand dollars have passed through my hands for the completion of the first volume. Who would believe that a lonely individual, who landed in England without a friend in the whole country, and with only sufficient pecuniary means to travel through it as a visitor, could have accomplished such a task as this publication! Who would believe that once, in London, Audubon had only one sovereign left in his pocket, and did not know of a single individual to whom he could apply to borrow another, when he was on the verge of failure in the very beginning of his undertaking! And, above all, who would believe that he extricated himself from all his difficulties, not by borrowing money, but by rising at four o'clock in the morning, working hard all day, and disposing of his works at a price which a common laborer would have thought little more than sufficient remuneration for his work!" In the four years required to bring out the work, fifty-six of his subscribers, representing the sum of fifty-six thousand dollars, abandoned him, and he was obliged to leave London, and go into the provinces to supply their places. September 3, 1831, Audubon returned to America, spent the winter in Eastern Florida, searching for birds and animals, and then some months in Labrador, having sent Victor to England to superintend the engraving of the drawings. In Labrador he collected one hundred and seventy-three skins of birds, and studied carefully the habits of the eider-duck, loons, wild geese, and other birds. Sometimes he was so weary from drawing that "my neck and shoulders, and most of all my fingers, have ached from the fatigue. The fact is, I am growing old too fast, alas! I feel it, and yet work I will, and may God grant me life to see the last plate of my mammoth work finished. "Labrador is so grandly wild and desolate," he said, "that I am charmed by its wonderful dreariness.... And yet how beautiful it is now, when your eye sees the wild bee, moving from one flower to another in search of food, which doubtless is as sweet to her as the essence of the orange and magnolia is to her more favored sister in Louisiana. The little ring-plover rearing its delicate and tender young; the eider-duck swimming man-of-war-like amid her floating brood, like the guardship of a most valuable convoy; the white-crowned bunting's sonorous note reaching your ears ever and anon; the crowds of sea-birds in search of places wherein to repose or to feed."