If it were feasible to have schools for ponies, and Gladys had had the benefit thereof, and at the same time no better manners than to have looked over Flutters's shoulder, this is what she might have read “just as easy as anything,” as you children say:
The Bunch of Grapes,
Burnham, Cheshire, England,
February 23d, 1784.
My dear Flutters: As perceived by the heading of this letter, I write from the inn in your father's village, to which place I made haste to journey so soon as I was favored with my furlough. And now, my dear Flutters, I have sad news to break to you, and for which you must nerve yourself, like the plucky little fellow that you are. Your good father is no longer a sojourner in this sad world of ours. He died after a very short illness, on the third of last September. I went to see his widow, told her I had some knowledge of you, and that if your father had left any message I would send it to you. She said she could not remember any, save that he used sometimes to say that he would like to know if you were well cared for. She does not seem to have as much heart as most women, and blest if I blame you much for running off as you did. I think your father left very little money, as folks say that your stepmother will have to do something to support herself and her children. Wishing I had better news to send you, Flutters, and with my dutiful respects to the dear Bonifaces, I close this letter—the longest I ever wrote in my life—and I hope never again to be obliged to write such another.
Yours dutifully,
R. A. Bellows.
“Oh, Gladys,” cried Flutters, when he had finished reading, and, leaning his head against the pony's head, he sobbed aloud. Such a whirl of emotion as that letter awoke for Flutters could not be put into words, and in his imagination he seemed to see his fathers grave and old Bobbin's side by side. The Bonifaces were all he had left now, and they, they were going to leave him; but, no, and a new light seemed to flash in on his mind—what was there now to hinder his going with them? His stepmother would never claim him. Indeed, she need never know he was in England, and so there was a bright side to Flutters's sorrow, and after a while he walked quietly out from the barn with the Sergeant's letter in his hand, and straight to Mrs. Boniface, whom he found in the Captain's room, and then and there he told them all his story, and after the telling felt he was even nearer and dearer to his new friends than ever he had been before.
Only Gladys ever knew how intense had been Flutters's first sorrow on reading the Sergeant's letter, but she was such a harum-scarum pony that probably the memory of it went out of her head full as quickly as the hairs, wet by Flutters's tears, dried on her forehead.