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 closed every one of them without reading a line. When all the books were arranged in a heap, he set fire to it.

The fire blazed forth. It gradually touched mythology, history, poetry, rhetoric, and grammar. Laws and codes of Manu, Jajnavalka and Parasar, philosophy of the schools of Nyaya, Vedanta, Shankhya and others, Kalpasutra, Arannyak and Upanishad, all took fire one by one. The priceless treasure of old books, which had been collected with great pains, became reduced to ashes. The books were all burnt down by the first part of the night, when Chandra Shekhar left his house with only a simple sheet on his body. Whither he left for, no one came to know and no one enquired about it.