What is recorded of these early years we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen.

The difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to refer her recollections to a somewhat later period--probably to the holidays he spent away from Sion House and Eton.

Still, since they introduce us to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper to make quotations from them in this place.

Miss Shelley tells us her brother "would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind of pranks.

One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist, old and grey, with a long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part.