Something should be said about the probable time of this illness. Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr. Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in regarding the illness as an incident of one of his 'holidays;' but there are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet's death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness. 'I went to school before Margaret,' Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1856, 'so that she recollects how Bysshe came home in the midst of the half-year to be nursed; and when he was allowed to leave the house, he came to the dining-room window, and kissed her through the pane of glass.' Hellen's age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness mentioned in the poet's strange story, Dr. Lind's visit to Field Place is a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness, the patient had been under Dr. Lind's medical treatment before he was sent home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for 'a second opinion,' than for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr. Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had already been, or would soon be, the boy's instructor in hard swearing, Mr. Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story occurred during the height of Dr. Lind's influence over the boy; as that influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe's stay at Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799) was already at school and in 'the middle of her half-year,' most readers will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same illness,--and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of 1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, _i.e._ when Shelley was sixteen years old.