Where To Bury A Dog

There are various places in which a dog may be buried.

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 an 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 his grave.
Beneath a cherry tree, or an apple, or any flowering shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a good dog. Beneath such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a flavorous bone, or lifted head to challenge some strange intruder.

These are good places, in life or in death.

Yet is it a small matter, and it touches sentiment more than anything else.
For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, questing, asking laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps at long and at last.
On a hill where the wind is rebuked and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream HE knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is one to a 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.

If you bury him in this spot, he 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 him nor resent him coming, for he belongs there.

People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper, people who have never really had a dog.
Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them.

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

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