When Johnnie Green sent him along the road at a trot, Twinkleheels' tiny
feet moved so fast that you could scarcely have told one from another.
Being a pony, and only half as big as a horse, he had to move his legs
twice as quickly as a horse did in order to travel at a horse's speed.
Twinkleheels' friends knew that he didn't care to be beaten by any
horse, no matter how long-legged.
"It's spirit, not size, that counts," Farmer Green often remarked as
he watched Twinkleheels tripping out of the yard, sometimes with
Johnnie on his back, sometimes drawing Johnnie in a little, red-wheeled
buggy.
Old dog Spot agreed with Farmer Green. When Twinkleheels first came to
live on the farm Spot had thought him something of a joke.
"Huh! This pony's nothing but a toy," he had told the farmyard folk.
"He's a child's plaything--about as much use as the little wooly dog
that lives down by the sawmill."
One trip to the village and back, behind Johnnie Green's glistening new
buggy, was enough to change Spot's opinion of the newcomer. Back from
the village Twinkleheels came clipping up the road and swung through
Farmer Green's front gate as fresh as a daisy. And old Spot, with his
tongue lolling out, and panting fast, was glad to lie down on the
woodshed step to rest.
"My goodness!" said Spot to Miss Kitty Cat. "This Twinkleheels is the
_goingest_ animal I ever followed. He doesn't seem to know the
difference between uphill and down. It's all the same to him. I did
think he'd walk now and then, or I'd never have travelled to the village
behind him."
"He's not lazy, like some people," Miss Kitty Cat hissed; and then crept
into the farmhouse before Spot could chase her. She had a poor opinion
of old Spot. And she never failed to let him know it.
It was true that Twinkleheels was not lazy. And it was just as true that
he liked to play. When Johnnie Green turned him loose in the pasture he
kicked and frisked about so gayly that Jimmy Rabbit and Billy Woodchuck
and their friends had to step lively now and then, to get out of his
way. They said they liked high spirits, but that Twinkleheels was almost
too playful.
When Twinkleheels took it into his head to do anything he did it without
the slightest warning. If he decided to shy at a bit of paper he was out
of the road before Johnnie Green knew what had happened. And if he
wanted to take a wrong turn, just for fun, he darted off so fast that he
usually had his way before Johnnie could shout "Whoa!" Everybody said
that he was as quick as Miss Kitty Cat. And that was the same as saying
that there wasn't anybody any quicker--unless it was Grumpy Weasel
himself.
But Twinkleheels and Miss Kitty were not alike in any other way; for
Twinkleheels was both merry and good-natured. He let Johnnie Green pick
up his feet, one at a time, and clean them. And the worst he ever did
was to give Johnnie a playful nip, just as Johnnie himself might have
pinched the boy that sat in front of him at school.
Only, of course, Johnnie Green wouldn't have used his teeth to do that.