Let us regard Bean through the glass of his earliest reactions to an environment that was commonplace, unstimulating, dull—­the little wooden town set among cornfields, “Wellsville” they called it, where he came from out of the Infinite to put on a casual body.

Of Bean at birth, it may be said frankly that he was not imposing.  He was not chubby nor rosy; had no dimples.  His face was a puckered protest at the infliction of animal life.  In the white garments conventional to his age he was a distressing travesty, even when he gurgled.  In the nude he was quite impossible to all but the most hardened mothers, and he was never photographed thus in a washbowl.  Even his own mother, before he had survived to her one short year, began to harbour the accursed suspicion that his beauty was not flawless nor his intelligence supreme.  To put it brutally, she almost admitted to herself that he was not the most remarkable child in all the world.  To be sure, this is a bit less incredible when we know that Bean’s mother, at his advent, thought far less highly of Bean’s father than on the occasion, seven years before, when she had consented to be endowed with all his worldly goods.  In the course of those years she came to believe that she had married beneath her, a fact of which she made no secret to her intimates and least of all to her mate, who, it may be added, privately agreed with her.  Alonzo Bean, after that one delirious moment at the altar, had always disbelieved in himself pathetically.  Who was he—­to have wed a Bunker!

When little Bean’s years began to permit small activities it was seen that his courage was amazing:  a courage, however, that quickly overreached itself, and was sapped by small defeats.  Tumbles down the slippery stairway, burns from the kitchen stove, began it.  When a prized new sailor hat was blown to the centre of a duck-pond he sought to recover it without any fearsome self-communing.  If faith alone could uphold one, Bean would have walked upon the face of the waters that day.  But the result was a bald experience of the sensations of the drowning, and a lasting fear of any considerable body of water.  Ever after it was an adventure not to be lightly dared to cross even the stoutest bridge.

And flying!  A belief that we can fly as the birds is surely not unreasonable at the age when he essayed it.  Nor should a mere failure to rise from the ground destroy it.  One must leap from high places, and Bean did so.  The roof of the chicken house was the last eminence to have an experimental value.  On his bed of pain he realized that we may not fly as the birds; nor ever after could he look without tremors from any high place.

Such domestic animals as he encountered taught him further fear.  Even the cat became contemptuous of him, knowing itself dreaded.  That splendid courage he was born with had faded to an extreme timidity.  Before physical phenomena that pique most children to cunning endeavour, little Bean was aghast.