His occupations during this period were multifarious enough. We must picture him to ourselves as a young-looking man of about thirty years of age, well made, and neat in his dress, his cheerfulness of disposition often breaking out in a short crispy laugh, but thoughtful enough when something important is to be done. He has to prepare the apparatus for Brande's lectures, and when the hour has arrived he stands on the right of the Professor, and helps him to produce the strange transformations of the chemical art. And conjurers, indeed, the two appear in the eyes of the youth on the left, who waits upon them, then the "laboratory assistant," now the well-known author, Mr. William Bollaert, from whom I have learnt many details of this period. When not engaged with the lectures, Faraday is manufacturing rare chemicals, or performing commercial analyses, or giving scientific evidence on trials. One of these was a famous one, arising from the Imperial Insurance Company resisting the claim of Severn and King, sugar-bakers; and in it appeared all the chemists of the day, like knights in the lists, on opposite sides, ready to break a lance with each other. All his spare time Faraday was occupied with original work. Chlorine had a fascination for him, though the yellow choking gas would get out into the room, and he investigated its combinations with carbon, squeezed it into a liquid, and applied it successfully as a disinfectant when fatal fever broke out in the Millbank Penitentiary. Iodine too, another of Davy's elements, was made to join itself to carbon and hydrogen; and naphthaline was tormented with strong mineral acids. Long, too, he tried to harden steel and prevent its rusting, by alloying it with small quantities of platinum and the rarer metals; the boy blew the bellows till the crucibles melted, but a few ordinary razors seem to have been the best results. Far more successful was he in repeating and extending some experiments of Ampère on the mutual action of magnets and electric currents; and when, after months of work and many ingenious contrivances, the wire began to move round the magnet, and the magnet round the wire, he himself danced about the revolving metals, his face beaming with joy--a joy not unmixed with thankful pride--as he exclaimed, "There they go! there they go! we have succeeded at last." After this discovery he thought himself entitled to a treat, and proposed to his attendant a visit to the theatre. "Which shall it be?" "Oh, let it be Astley's, to see the horses." So to Astley's they went; but at the pit entrance there was a crush; a big fellow pressed roughly upon the lad, and Faraday, who could stand no injustice, ordered him to behave himself, and showed fight in defence of his young companion.