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