_William Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers, was born in 1564, and was pretty well educated for those days. The free school of the town was open to all boys, and his father could afford to send him to it. He early became an actor, and from correcting plays by other people he came to writing plays himself. Shakespeare possessed a very unusual combination of two rare gifts. On the one side he had to a great degree the ability to understand men and women and read the thoughts that were passing through their minds. But his second gift, which was more wonderful still, was his ability to write down on paper words that, as soon as we read them, make us feel just as he did, make us see just the pictures he saw. Four of his plays are here represented by short stories, in which the plot of each play is briefly told. To play Shakespeare's plays is the height of an actor's ambition. To read and enjoy them has been for over three hundred years one of the greatest pleasures known to English-speaking people._ A MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM Retold by E. Nesbit HERMIA and Lysander were lovers; but Hermia's father wished her to marry another man, named Demetrius. Now, in Athens, where they lived, there was a wicked law, by which any girl who refused to marry according to her father's wishes, might be put to death. Hermia's father was so angry with her for refusing to do as he wished, that he actually brought her before the Duke of Athens to ask that she might be killed, if she still refused to obey him. The duke gave her four days to think about it, and, at the end of that time, if she still refused to marry Demetrius, she would have to die. Lysander of course was nearly mad with grief, and the best thing to do seemed to him for Hermia to run away to his aunt's house at a place beyond the reach of that cruel law; and there he would come to her and marry her. But before she started, she told her friend, Helena, what she was going to do. Helena had been Demetrius's sweetheart long before his marriage with Hermia had been thought of, and being very silly, like all jealous people, she could not see that it was not poor Hermia's fault that Demetrius wished to marry her instead of his own lady, Helena. She knew that if she told Demetrius that Hermia was going, as she was, to the wood outside Athens, he would follow her, "and I can follow him, and at least I shall see him," she said to herself. So she went to him, and betrayed her friend's secret.