I made a bold effort to reopen the conversation.

"I suppose Cousin Nancy asked you to build your house round, instead of
square?"

I had heard so many different stories about the odd structure which was
one of the county curiosities that I was anxious to get at the truth.

He laughed low and pleasantly:--

"Ask me! Not she, bless your soul! She would never have thought of such
a thing. 'Twas me that studied it out, lying awake on windy nights
because I knew she couldn't sleep for the roaring and whistling around
the corners of the old house, and the wind humming in the chimneys and
between the window-sashes like a bumblebee as big as a whale. It made
her feel so lonesome and blue that many's the time I've heard her crying
to herself when she thought I was sound asleep. We were going to pull
down the old house, anyhow. It was a rickety concern, and inconvenient
as could be. So I got Miss Nancy to tell me how many rooms and closets
and all that she'd like to have in a house that was to be built on
purpose for her, and for nobody else, and I made a plan of it all on
paper, and then I sent her up to stay with her mother in Buckingham
County for six months, going up to see her myself every Saturday to
spend Sunday--like a nigger going to his 'wife-house,'"--here he stopped
to laugh again--"until the last window-shutter was hung, and all the
furniture put back and in order--Je_rew_salem! how I _did_ work! Then I
brought her home. I wish you could have seen her face when we came in
sight of the solid brick house--round as a cheese box--and I told her I
had it built in that shape, so's she should never be made sorrowful, nor
kept awake again by the wind a-cutting up shines around sharp corners,
so long as we both should live--Amen!"

He jerked a blazing red bandanna handkerchief out of his pocket, turning
his face clear away from me to do it, and blew his nose until the woods
rang as with the echoes of a foxhunter's horn, then rolled the
handkerchief into a ball and polished his face with it in the oddest
possible fashion.

Most of the tales current about the round brick house had something to
do with Cousin Nancy's whims, especially with her dislike to hearing the
wind blow around the corners. Young as I was, I felt, after hearing
Cousin 'Ratio's story, that he had done a beautiful thing in planning
the ingenious surprise for his delicate wife. It crossed my mind, too,
that she might have thought the house as ridiculo