A century ago, from the mill at the head of the valley to the Wreckers’ Hut on the foreshore, Trevorrick had been the property of one man. Of peasant stock, how Freathy Rosevear came by land and money was matter of surmise. ’He had gone out one morning a poor man, and had come home rich.’ Little need, however, to invent tales of hidden treasure, witchcraft, divination, when the caves in Morwen Cove made so safe a store-house: when the Wreckers’ Hut stood behind the teeth of the Mad Rip: when the lanes that converged upon the towns—the towns in which queer commodities could always be sold—were so deep and secret. Whatever the sources of his income, as fortunes went, in that remote district, Freathy Rosevear was accounted wealthy. He was also a man to take the eye. Big, florid, fair, he might have stepped out of a Holbein canvas, and tales of his unusual strength were told and retold of a winter’s evening in the cottages. Did his wife complain the store of wreck was running low? Forthwith he had gone out, caught the first of the homing donkeys, and carried it, load and all, into her presence, with "A fardel for my Lady"—so the story. The man was as Saul to a kingless folk, a head and shoulders above the multitude. Like the last of the Tudor monarchs he brought the people among whom he lived material well-being, and, like other outstanding personalities, stamped his impress on the current coin. Before he died he was "Old Squire" and, as such, he lived in the long memory of the countryside. Not that to them his death was the final exit from the stage of his influence and activities. Though they followed him to his burying, though they saw the sods falling earth to earth, they could not believe that abundant, penetrating, imperial vitality could be resolved into its elements. Recognizing that neither heaven nor hell was the fitting place for it, they showed their faith in the life after death by a hardy belief that Old Squire, though rendered invisible, was still among them. When this man’s grip upon Trevorrick relaxed, the land fell to his three legitimate sons: for his other children, and he had done his part in peopling the neighbourhood, he had provided during his life. The legitimate sons, Freathy, Constantine, and Tom, were good farmers all, but cast in an ordinary mould. They lived, they replenished the earth and, in the fullness of time, went back to it, dust to dust. A younger Constantine now owned the mill, a younger Tom tilled the fat slopes of Hember, and Wastralls, the cradle of the race, was become the property of Freathy’s only child, his daughter Sabina. Every rood of land in the valley was still Rosevear property, and the cousins, shut in by their hill boundaries, formed a community conscious at once of its kinship and its isolation.