Lovely letters again — funny to think of Enid experiencing a near drought at this time of year when we've just had so much snow! I still find it a bit strange how "the kitten" apparently doesn't have a name after all this time. (Well, not nearly as strange as Sandy's famous gender confusion, but "he" seems to be firmly a "he" again now that the puppies are gone.)
"The Great Big Bone" was a good one. There's a story in the compilation
Stories for You by the same name (but with an exclamation mark) that's narrated by Bobs — I never realised, reading that when I was little, that Bobs was Enid's own dog and something of a literary star!
Going by the Cave, that story was first published in Teacher's World in 1935, the next year on from where we're reading. It's another story of a squabble over a bone, this time between Bobs and a smaller dog, but in this case it's Bobs who falls for the other dog's trick — pretending to be poisoned when he tastes the bone, so Bobs runs off to get help, and of course when he comes back with Mistress, there's no little dog and no bone either...
Actually, this 1934 story of "The Great Big Bone" is also quite similar to another story from
Stories for You, "The Horse, the Wasp and the Donkey" (also originally published in Teacher's World in 1935) — in this case the quarrel is between the horse and the wasp over an apple, and the donkey tricks the two of them into having a race from the other end of the field (rather like the starlings with Sandy) to decide who should have the apple. You can guess who gets it!
It does show Enid recycling the same basic plot several times even during a short period of her career, but she makes each version different enough that they each have a different atmosphere and are all enjoyable to read.