A customer at the shop had become interested in a boy who cared so much for science, and took him to hear four lectures given by Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. This was an unexpected pleasure. He was beginning to sigh for something beyond book-binding. "Oh, if I could only help in some scientific work, no matter how humble!" he thought to himself. He says in his journal, "In my ignorance of the world, and simplicity of my mind, I wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society." No answer was ever returned to the request for a situation. Could the president have realized that some day ten thousand people would know the name of Michael Faraday where one knew the name of Sir Joseph Banks, probably he would have answered the boy's letter. Blessings on the great man or woman who takes time, however briefly, to answer every letter received! Such a man was Garfield, and such is Whittier. A civil question demands a civil answer, whether the person addressed be king or peasant. About the time his apprenticeship ended, in 1812, he summoned courage to write directly to the great Sir Humphry Davy, sending the full notes he had made at that gentleman's lectures. Sir Humphry, possibly remembering that he, too, had been a poor boy, the son of a widowed milliner, wrote a polite note, saying, that "Science was a harsh mistress, and, in a pecuniary point of view, but poorly rewarding those who devoted themselves to her service;" that he was going out of town, but would see if he could some time aid him. Meantime Michael was making crude galvanic experiments. He bought some malleable zinc, cut out seven plates, each the size of a half-penny, covered these with the copper half-pennies, placing between them six pieces of paper soaked in a solution of muriate of soda, and with this simple battery, decomposed sulphate of magnesia. So pleased was he that he wrote a letter to one of his boy friends, telling of the experiment, and adding, "Time is all I require. Oh, that I could purchase at a cheap rate some of our modern gent's spare hours, nay, days! I think it would be a good bargain, both for them and for me." The youth had learned the first secret of success,--not to waste time; not to throw it away on useless persons or useless subjects. He had learned another secret, that of choosing right companions. To this same young friend, Abbott, he wrote, "A companion cannot be a good one, unless he is morally so. I have met a good companion in the lowest path of life, and I have found such as I despised in a rank far superior to mine.... I keep regular hours, and enter not intentionally into pleasures productive of evil." London's highest circles possessed no purer spirit than this young mechanic.