I opened it and read a few paragraphs in the hall. I did not understand them, though they somehow held my mind and produced a curious sense of familiarity, half of wonder, half of satisfaction. A deeper feeling than I had yet known woke in me. I was fascinated.... My father’s voice calling me to tennis interrupted my reading, and I dropped the book, noticing that it fell behind the table. Hours later, though the bag was gone, the book lay where it had fallen. I stole it. I took it to bed with me and read it through from cover to cover. I read it twice, three times; bits of it I copied out; I did not understand a word of it, but a shutter rushed up in my mind, interest and joy were in me, a big troubling emotion, a conviction that I had found something I had been seeking hungrily for a long time, something I needed, something that, in an odd way, almost seemed familiar. I repeat--I did not understand a word of it, while yet the meaningless phrases caught me with a revolutionary power. As I read and re-read till my candles guttered, there rose in me a dim consciousness, becoming more and more a growing certainty, that what I read was not entirely new. So strong was this that it demanded audible expression. In that silent bedroom, dawn not far away, I can hear myself saying aloud: “But I’ve known all this before--only I’ve forgotten it.” Even the Sanskrit words, given phonetically in brackets, had a familiar look. Shutter after shutter rose, “lifting a veil and a darkness,” letting in glimpses of a radiant and exciting light. Though the mind was too untaught to grasp the full significance of these electric flashes, too unformed to be even intelligently articulate about them, there certainly rushed over my being a singular conviction of the unity of life everywhere and in everything--of its _one-ness_. That objects, the shifting appearance of phenomena, were but a veil concealing some intensely beautiful reality--the beauty shining and divine, the reality bitingly, terrifically actual--this poured over me with a sense of being not so much dis-covered as re-covered. Ignorant as I was, without facts or arguments or reason to support me, this I _knew_. It is possible the awakening consciousness fringed some state of ecstasy during that long communing with ancient things.... The house, at any rate, was still dark, but sunrise not long to come, when at length I stole down into the deserted hall and replaced the little book upon the table.