During the periods of rest which his failing health made necessary, Faraday would go off to Brighton or Hastings with his wife, where he would spend a few days in quiet idleness. In February, 1851, he was at Brighton, where Mr. Masquerier, the French refugee who had in early life given him lessons in geometry, was living. In Crabb Robinson's diary the following entry, which is of much interest to us here, occurs against February 18: "(At Masquerier's, Brighton.) We had calls soon after breakfast. The one to be mentioned was that of Faraday, one of the most remarkable men of the day, the very greatest of our discoverers in chemistry, a perfect lecturer in the unaffected simplicity and intelligent clearness in his statement; so that the learned are instructed and the ignorant charmed. His personal character is admirable. When he was young, poor, and altogether unknown, Masquerier was kind to him; and now that he is a great man he does not forget his old friend." An interesting story is told by Dr. Scoffern of an incident that happened during this year; an incident that illustrates in a remarkable manner the unaltered good humour and geniality which belonged to Faraday as much during his later as his earlier years. Professor Brande was lecturing at the time on a newly-discovered method of purifying sugar by sugar of lead; while they were in the laboratory Scoffern accidentally let fall a retort of corrosive liquid. In an instant, he tells us, Professor Faraday "threw some soda upon the floor; then down on his hands and knees he went, slop cloth in hand, like any humble housemaid. Laughing, I expressed my desire to photograph him then and there; he demurred to the pose, begged me to consult his dignity, and began laughing with a childish joyousness. Hilariously boyish upon occasion he could be, and those who knew him best, knew he was never more at home, that he never seemed so pleased as when making an 'old boy' of himself, as he was wont to say, lecturing before a juvenile audience at Christmas." Faraday, as has been said earlier, attended some of the annual meetings of the British Association; in this year of 1851 the meeting was held at Ipswich, and on that occasion Dr. J. H. Gladstone says he first met Faraday to have any intercourse with him. "I watched him," he writes, "with all the interest of an admiring disciple, and there is deeply engraven on my memory the vivacity of his conversation, the eagerness with which he entered into some mathematico-chemical speculations of Dumas, and the playfulness with which, when we were dining together, he cut boomerangs out of card, and shot them across the table at his friends."