The news of the banishment of one of Spain’s foremost writers and patriots was received with a spontaneous outburst of denunciation both at home and abroad. Numerous councils of universities and learned societies in Europe and America passed resolutions of protest; the newspaper press of almost every country published articles by representative literary men condemning the action of the government and testifying to the universality of the esteem which Unamuno had won in the international republic of letters. The Directory was compelled to recognize that the sole result of its act of petty tyranny had been to raise the prestige of its victim and damage its own. A project for the rescue of the exile was secretly organized in France, but its fruition was forestalled by the publication of a decree of amnesty in July, 1924. Unamuno embarked on the sailing-ship which had been dispatched for his deliverance and on arriving at Madeira took ship to Cherbourg. Although free to return to Spain, he felt that under the present régime his liberty of action would be too much circumscribed and therefore preferred to take up his residence temporarily in Paris. I think that it was in the year 1912 when travelling in Spain that I chanced to buy a book entitled _Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ by Miguel de Unamuno. Both the book and its author were then unkown to me. Before I had read many pages I knew that I was listening to a voice that spoke with that accent of sincerity and intimacy which gives the assurance of immediate contact with a living man, a man of flesh and bone, a man who had suffered, despaired, hoped and struggled with an intensity that burned in every word. Next year was published _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, that passionate record of the adventures of the spirit that takes its place with the self-revelations of St. Augustine, Pascal, Amiel and Kierkegaard. I resolved that if I could accomplish it this voice should be heard in the countries that speak the English tongue. The War intervened, and it was not until 1920 that I found myself in Salamanca with the typewritten sheets of the translation of “The Tragic Sense of Life” ready to be submitted to the author for revision.