Her man moves slow through a strange outward world; for he is wholly embraced by the close of his home and his woman. He wears knee-breeches of hide that are tight as a skin and box his rump into a rigid square. He wears a coat of raw sheepskin with a gap for the head and gaps for the arms. For shoes, he has a bundle of rags cased in sandal-soles and thonged. His hat is either the black skull boina of the Basque or the true sombrero of Castile--pie-shaped, velvety black, with the center pyramiding up to a peak. You see him best when he goes astride his ass. A crude plaid muffler (_tapabocas_) stops his mouth. The woolen manta regally folds from his shoulders to the flanks of his brute. The burro trots sharp and perpendicular. The man is movelessly erect, untinged by the mount’s rhythm. Even a peasant, even on an ass, he seems a caballero. His head is sternly forward; his hands do not stir; he is silent. His world is a coarse world. Winter is a blast and summer is a blast; the short spring covers his field with mud more than with flowers. This his encasement. And within, a balance like a tree’s of sun and earth and weather. He wages an intricate but instinctive warfare within the Hand of God. For God makes the sun a sear or a dim mockery; and God makes foes of the men of the world. Unto the bloody Moor of yesterday there has succeeded the bleeding Noble. Yet he has won of this complexity a peace simple and deep. He lives in a profound seclusion. Love and work are his hearthfire. And from their secret place he can look out, his eyes old in understanding, his eyes bright with the irony of distance. * * * * * Within this land of unkempt fields studded with encina, land of wild bulls, of towns shut from the sun and the wind, there glows a jewel that has warmed the world. It is the city of Salamanca. It lies in treeless mountains. Northward Zamora bristles warlike, westward Portugal turns an unfriendly back: and all about, Castile. Sierra de Gata, Peña de Francia, Sierra de Béjar, Sierra de Gredos ... from such wild quarries has come the mellow stone to build a scholar city: the city of the Wisdom and the Love of God within the crude dichotomy of Spain.