He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a trumpet.  Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his language was splendid.  Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator’s force, hung silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers relieved the tension.

He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced round, and handed me mine with a questioning “Mrs. Besant?” Then he said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his lecture.  Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion.  He laughed and said he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was Annie Besant.

From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me stretches through Death’s gateway and links us together still.  As friends, not as strangers, we met—­swift recognition, as it were, leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient tie, we did not begin a new one.  And so in lives to come we shall meet again, and help each other as we helped each other in this.  And let me here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to him I can never tell.  Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in my memory.  “You should never say you have an opinion on a subject until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the view to which you are inclined.”  “You must not think you know a subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have said about it.”  “No steady work can be done in public unless the worker study at home far more than he talks outside.”  “Be your own harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it.”  “Do not waste time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do not readily see.”  Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours, where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led,