yard; now and again he would open a book and instantly tie it up unread, and ultimately collected them all in a heap. When the pile was made up he set fire to it.

The fire blazed up. The Puranas, History, Poetry, Rhetoric, Grammar, everything gradually took fire; the laws of Manu, Jagnavalka, and Parasara, the Darsanas, the Philosophy of Naya, Vedanta, Sankhya, etc., the Kalpa —Sutras, Arannyakas and the Upanishads,^[1] one by one, all caught the flame and blazed up. Nothing but ashes was left of that mass of invaluable books collected with infinite pains and studied over a length of time. By nine o'clock at night when the burning had been done with only a single scarf to wrap his body with, Chandrashekhar left his ancestral roof-tree. No one knew whither he went nor did any one enquire.

1. ↑ All these form part of the sacred literature of the Hindus.