which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it
was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of
the very ground-plan of the house itself--everywhere was the token of
their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway
through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely
together.

Why this irregularity of ground-plan?--the traveller would ask;
recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the
eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the
part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of
architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question,
true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making
the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large
measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death,
some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could
hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is
plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty
remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a
crenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some
ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained.
It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that had
allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at
this point in its growth.

And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite
motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect
the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity
of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of
that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house--a