On my return to London I had, notwithstanding all my shortcomings and discrepancies, the satisfaction to be well received by my principals of the Foreign Office, and to be handsomely rewarded for the duties I had performed. With the money thus acquired I had resolved to emigrate to Spanish America, which at that time offered a favourable field for persons of my adventurous disposition. Still deluded, however, by the false hopes that the gaming-table so incessantly held out to me, I ventured a small stake in the expectation of adding to the little fund which I had collected to take with me. But once within the magic circle I was wholly unable to get out, and instead of carrying my emigration project into effect, I spent the next three years of my life (from 1817 to 1820) in a continual whirl of misery and disappointment at the gaming-table. I look back upon this dark period of my chequered career with the deepest regret, and would, if I could, blot it out entirely from the records of my existence. The final and pitiful result of these three years of unbridled folly and disheartening dissipation was that, through the ingratitude and low cunning of a person who resided with me in Tottenham Court Road I was arrested one day on a charge of having pawned certain articles of furniture belonging to my land-lady.