The first Penhale was a squat, burly man and built his habitation to fit himself, but the succeeding generations ran to height and were in constant danger of braining themselves against the ceilings. They could sit erect, but never rose without glancing aloft, and when they stood up their heads well-nigh disappeared among the deep beams. This had inculcated in them the habit of stooping instinctively on stepping through any door. A Dean of Gwithian used to swear that the Penhale family entered his spacious church bent double. The first Penhale, being of small stature, made his few windows low down; the subsequent Penhales had to squat to see out of them. Not that the Penhales needed windows to look out of; they were an open-air breed who only came indoors to eat and sleep. The ugly, cramped old house served their needs well. They came home from the uplands or the bottoms at the fall of night, came in from plowing, shooting, hedging or driving cattle, came mud-plastered, lashed by the winter winds, saw Bosula lights twinkling between the sheltering trees, bowed their tall heads between Adam and Eve and, entering the warm kitchen, sat down to mighty meals of good beef and good vegetables, stretched their legs before the open hearth, grunting with full-fed content, and yawned off to bed and immediate sleep, lulled by the croon of the brook and the whisper of the wind in the treetops. Gales might skim roofs off down in the Cove, ships batter to matchwood on the Twelve Apostles, upland ricks be scattered over the parish, the Penhales of Bosula slept sound in the lap of the hills, snug behind three-foot walls. In winter, looking down from the hills, you could barely see Bosula for trees, in summer not at all. They filled the valley from side to side and for half a mile above and below the house, oak, ash, elm and sycamore with an undergrowth of hazel and thorn. Near the house the stream, narrowed to a few feet, ran between banks of bowlders piled up by the first Penhale and his tinners. They had rooted up bowlders everywhere and left them lying anyhow, on their ends or sides, great uneven blocks of granite, now covered with an emerald velvet of moss or furred with gray and yellow lichen. Between these blocks the trees thrust, flourishing on their own leaf mold. The ashes and elms went straight up till they met the wind leaping from hill to hill and then stopped, nipped to an even height as a box-hedge is trimmed by shears; but the thorns and hazels started crooked and grew crooked all the way, their branches writhing and tangling into fantastic clumps and shapes to be overgrown and smothered in toils of ivy and honeysuckle.