Himself a glutton of horrible tales, the Etonian-at-home was ever ready with a harrowing narrative of tragic crime and ghastly consequences, when the girls begged him to tell them something terrible, by the flickering light of their play-room fire. He overflowed, also, with stories about the alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, who was represented as living up aloft in a spacious garret, under the roof of Field Place, directly over the heads of the excited children, grouped about this playroom's only source of light. To their frequent entreaties for a personal introduction to the mysterious and benevolent Cornelius, Percy used to assure his sisters that in due course they should see the philosopher, his books, his lamp, his venerable beard, when he should migrate from the garret to the cave, soon to be dug for him in the orchard, and furnished with all the apparatus needful for his investigations and experiments. At other times Percy entertained his sisters with anecdotes of the Great Tortoise, that had lived for centuries and grown to enormous magnitude in and near Warnham Pond. What he told them of the fabulous tortoise does not appear. It is so difficult to get anything but turtle-soup and hair-combs out of a tortoise of any kind, one would like to know how the boy contrived to inspire his auditors with a vivid interest in this creature of his imagination. To do so he may be presumed to have talked freely and with wild disregard for the teaching of the best authorities on natural history. Towards the close of his Eton time (or possibly somewhat later, between his withdrawal from Eton and departure for Oxford) Percy Bysshe discarded the Big Tortoise and replaced it with the Great Snake, that was supposed to have lived for three hundred years in the Field Place gardens, before it was killed by the scythe of the careless or ruthless gardener, during the childhood of its imaginative historian. Biographers, who smile at the Shelleyan girls for putting faith in their brother's taradiddles about the Big Tortoise, are firm believers in his taradiddles about the monstrous and Venerable Serpent. Indeed, they are apt to be indignant with flippant sceptics, who declare themselves as ready to believe in the Warnham Tortoise as in the Field Place Snake. How the snake had amused itself for three hundred years in the grass and flower-beds of the garden is not on the record. Nor does it appear how the young historian came upon the evidence of its longevity.