About dusk he returns home and withdraws to his study, a spacious, lofty square room, the plain workshop of the intellectual worker, furnished only with a large writing-table, a few simple chairs, and crowded bookshelves which not only surround the walls but occupy most of the floor-space. A brazier underneath the table emits from its white ashes a faint warmth scarcely perceptible to ordinary senses. Having refreshed himself with a drink of cold water, Unamuno takes up the work in hand and writes until the hour arrives for the evening meal with his family. The theatre does not attract him--I only saw him present once when Ibsen was being played--and it is very seldom that a social function keeps him from going to bed betimes. Profound as is his attachment to the city which has been his home for over thirty years, Unamuno always welcomes an opportunity to escape from streets and squares into the open country and the mountains. His knowledge of the Peninsula, as his books of travel testify, is both wide and intimate. His visits to the more distant provinces are of course reserved for the vacations, but during term-time his week-ends and the holidays occurring on the seasonal feasts are often spent in the regions of the Sierra de Gredos and the Peña de Francia. During these excursions he touches life at a multiplicity of centres and penetrates into all the various social strata. At every stage of the journey--at the railway stations, in the train, at the local club, in the inn, in the village shop or the peasant’s cottage--he is usually to be seen at the centre of a group of men, discussing local affairs and politics, inquiring into the technique of trades, saturating himself in the atmosphere of popular thought and belief. His knowledge and love of Spain are thus fed by a familiarity with the inner life of the people, the intra-historical life, as he calls it, the life that flows by unobserved for the most part by politicians and publicists and never agitates the surface of history. A minor outcome of this contact with the people, and with the _charros_ or peasants of the province of Salamanca in particular, has been the enrichment of his vocabulary by many of those pungent, expressive and sometimes beautiful words and locutions which have long since disappeared from literary Spanish but still abound in peasant speech. This racy idiom of the soil often gives a peculiar tang to Unamuno’s writing. When accused by the literary critic, as not infrequently happens, of sprinkling his prose with words unearthed from the dusty works of some sixteenth or seventeenth-century author, he will reply that the so-called archaisms, though possibly unfamiliar in literary coteries, still enjoy a vigorous life in the speech of the people.