costumes to represent fiends or spirits he ran about with liquid fire until this dangerous play was stopped.  Then he made an electric battery and amused himself by giving his sisters “shocks” to the secret terror of at least one of them whose heart would sink with fear when she saw her brother appear with a roll of brown paper, a bit of wire, and a bottle.  But one day she could not hide her terror any longer, and after that the kind big brother never worried her any more to have shocks.

Sometimes, too, their games took them further afield, and led by Bysshe the children went on long rambles through woods and meadows, climbing walls and scrambling through hedges, and coming home tired and muddy.  Bysshe was so happy with his sisters and little brother that he decided to buy a little girl and bring her up as his own.  One day a little gypsy girl came to the back door, and he though she would do very well.  His father and mother, however, thought otherwise, so the little girl was not bought.

But the boy who was so lively with his sisters, at times was quiet and thoughtful.  Sometimes he would slip out of the house on moonlight nights.  His anxious parents would then send an old servant after him, who would return to say that “Master Bysshe only took a walk, and came back again.”  A very strange form of amusement it must have seemed to his plain matter-of-fact father.

But now these careless happy days came to an end, or only returned during holiday times, for when Bysshe was ten years old he was sent to school.

Shelley went first to a private school, and after a year or two to Eton, but at neither was he happy.  And although he had been so merry at home, at school he was looked upon as a strange unsociable creature.  He refused to fag for the bigger boys.  He never joined in the ordinary school games, and would wander about by himself reading, or watching the clouds and the birds.  He read all kinds of books, liking best those which told of haunted castles, robbers, giants, murderers, and other eerie subjects.  He liked chemistry too, and was more than once brought into trouble by the daring experiments he made.  Shelley was very brave and never afraid of anything except what was base and low.  To the few who loved him he was gentle, but most of his schoolfellows took delight in tormenting him.  And when goaded into wrath he showed that he could be fierce.

Shelley soon began to write, and while still at school, at the age of sixteen, he published a novel for which he received 40 pounds.  A little later he and one of his sisters published a book of poems together.