In all his young life he had found no sport so good as riding on the seat beside that father while he drove the express wagon; a shiny green wagon with a seat close to the front and a tilted rest for one’s feet, drawn by a grand black horse with a high-flung head, that would make nothing of eating a small boy if it ever had the chance.  You drove to incoming trains, which was high adventure.  But that was not all.  You loaded the wagon with packages from the trains and these you proceeded to deliver in a leisurely and important manner.  And some citizen of weight was sure to halt the wagon and ask if that there package of stuff from Chicago hadn’t showed up yet, and it was mighty funny if it hadn’t, because it was ordered special.  Whereupon you said curtly that you didn’t know anything about that—­you couldn’t fetch any package if it hadn’t come, could you?  And you drove on with pleased indignation.

Yet so fine a game as this was held by his mother to be unedifying.  He would pick up a fashion of speech not genteel; he would grow to be a “rough.”  She, the inconsequent fair, who had herself been captivated by the driver of that very wagon, a gay blade directing his steed with a flourish!  To be sure, she had found him doing this in a mist of romance, as one who must have his gallant fling at life before settling down.  But the mist had cleared.  Alonzo Bean, no longer the gay blade, had settled down upon the seat of his wagon.  Once he had touched the guitar, sung an acceptable tenor, jested with life.  Now he drove soberly, sang no more, and was concerned chiefly that his meals be served at set hours.

Small wonder, perhaps, that the mother should have feared the Bean and laboured to cultivate the true Bunker strain in her offspring.  Small wonder that she kept him when she could from the seat of that wagon and from the deadening influence of a father to whom Romance had broken its fine promises.  Little Bean distressed her enough by playing at express-wagon in preference to all other games.  He meant to drive a real one when he was big enough—­that is, at first.  Secretly he aspired beyond that.  Some day, when he would not be afraid to climb to a higher seat, he meant to drive the great yellow ’bus that also went to trains.  But that was a dream too splendid to tell.

In the summer of his seventh year, when his mother was finding it increasingly difficult to supply antidotes for this poison, she even consented to his visiting some other Beans.  Unfortunately, there were no Bunkers to harbour the child of one who had made so palpable a mesalliance; but the elder Beans would gladly receive him, and they at least had never driven express wagons.

To the little boy, who had no sense of their relationship, they were persons named “Gramper” and “Grammer” whom he would do well to look down upon because they were not Bunkers.  So much he understood, and that he was to ride in a stage and find them on a remote farm.  It was to be the summer of his first feat of daring since he had reached years of moral discretion.