Keeper Of The Stars

We are thinking now of a setter, whose coat was flame in the sunshine and who, so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean or unworthy thought. This setter is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry tree strews petals on the green lawn of her grave. Beneath a cherry tree, or an apple, or any flowering shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a dog.


Beneath such trees, such shrubs, she slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a flavored bone, or lifted her head to challenge some strange intruder. These are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter, and it touches sentiment more than anything else.


For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes she leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, questing, asking, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps and at last. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream she knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pasture land where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog, and all one to you, and nothing is gained and nothing lost -- if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog. One place that is best of all.


If you bury her in this spot, the secret of which you must already have, she will come to you when you call -- come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path and to your side again. And though you may call a dozen living dogs to heel, they shall not growl at her nor resent her coming, for she is yours and she belongs here.


People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by her footfall, who hear no whimper pitched too fine for mere audition, people who have never really had a dog. Smile at them then, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth knowing.


The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of her master.

Author unknown.

ETHYL: Tribute To A Four Legged Friend
Where To Bury A Dog


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Counter re-set April 22, 1999.

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