Consider: the Roseveans, from father to son, had been from time immemorial wreckers, smugglers, and pilots. They were also farmers. On their little farm they grew nearly enough to support their simple lives. They had pigs and poultry; they had milch cows; they had a few sheep; they kept geese, pigeons, ducks; they made their own beer and their own cordials and strong waters; they made their own linen; they were unto themselves millers, tinkers, carpenters, cabinet-makers, builders, and thatchers. They grew their own salads and vegetables, and if they wanted any fruit they grew that as well. Oats and barley they grew, clover and hay. I believe that on Samson wheat has never been grown--indeed, there are only eighty acres in all. There was left, therefore, little to buy. Coals, wood for fuel and for carpentering, things in iron, crockery, tools, cloth clothes, flannel, flour, and sometimes a little beef--what else did they want? As for fish, they had only to catch as much as they wanted. Tea, coffee, sugar, and so forth came in with later civilisation, when small ale, possets, and hypsy died out. In order to provide these small deficiencies they were pilots, to begin with. This trade brought in a steady income. They also sent out boats, filled with fresh vegetables, to meet the homeward-bound East Indiamen. And they were also, like the rest of the artless islanders, wreckers and smugglers. In the former capacity they occasionally acquired an extraordinary quantity of odd and valuable things. In the latter profession they made at times, and until the Peace and the Preventive Service put an end to the business, a really fine income. Then, on Samson, they continued to live after the patriarchal fashion and in the old simplicity. Each Captain Rosevean in turn was the chieftain or sheik. To him his family brought all that they earned or found. The sea-chest took it all. For three hundred years, at least, this sea-chest received everything and gave up nothing. Nobody ever took anything out of it: nobody looked into it: nobody knew, until Ursula counted the money and made bags for it, what there was in the chest. Nobody ever asked if they were rich or how rich they were.