I well remember how, on the afternoon after my arrival, I was sitting in a café on the Plaza Mayor when the door opened and my eyes fell upon the arresting figure of a man half-way through the fifties, clad in a double-breasted blue-serge jacket with a rim of white collar falling over a kind of clerical waistcoat that was void of the usual triangular opening for the display of shirt and necktie, his head crowned by a round parsonical black hat. There was an almost aggressive announcement of bluff health and energy in the erect carriage of the body, the alert set of the head on squared shoulders, the thick brush-like crop of iron-grey hair, the crisp curl of the close-trimmed beard that emphasized rather than masked the firm lines of the jaw, the keen glance behind gold-rimmed spectacles of eyes that gleamed bright and brown like the eyes of a bird of prey. It would have been difficult for one to whom he was a stranger to have guessed his vocation from his appearance. Certainly never was philosopher less sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. The tan that bronzed a skin glowing with the flush of health seemed to tell of a life that was spent in the air of the mountains rather than in the study. It could scarcely be doubted that the figure standing there in the doorway was that of a man of action and a fighter. During the course of the next two months I had ample opportunity to observe the daily routine of Unamuno’s life at Salamanca. An early riser, he may be seen in the streets before nine o’clock on his way to the lecture-room. After the midday _comida_, at which he usually abstains from both wine and meat, he is accustomed to take his coffee at the Circulo Salmantino with a group of friends whose thought and convictions are as widely varying as their occupations--university professors, students, doctors, magistrates, writers, poets and men of business. The quite unacademic conversation ranges over the whole gamut of human interests. While the talk is flowing freely or the argument being waged, Unamuno--who, by the way, is a non-smoker--may sometimes be seen folding square sheets of paper with deft fingers into complicated geometrical patterns which presently grow into astonishingly realistic shapes of animals. Before the party breaks up, his table is not infrequently covered with a menagerie of pigs, jumping frogs, vultures and other wildfowl, to the no small delight of the street urchins whose noses are flattened against the other side of the wide plate-glass window. This _arte salmatino_, as its inventor calls it, presents baffling constructional problems, the solutions of which are sometimes thought out upon abstract geometrical principles in the sleepless watches of the night.