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34 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, 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.