"his fidelity without deceit"

(First things first: Happy belated birthday, Boy -- I likes me a cat that can party hard.)

The title of today's post comes from Queen Victoria's epitaph for her spaniel Dash, the companion of her youth: "His attachment was without selfishness, his playfulness without malice, his fidelity without deceit." This is the dog that she came home to after her coronation at the tender age of 18, promptly shucking off her queenly gear to pop him into a bath.

She usually did have her priorities straight. Of course, we are talking about a mother as well - the kind who would muse in a family letter that perhaps her son Bertie and his wife weren't going to have very bright children, since they both had such small heads. I am serious. Go read Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals if you don't believe me.

I digress. I actually wanted to direct you to a very well done site belonging to Hartsdale Pet Cemetery and Crematorium. Among its wealth of interesting information is a page on the history of pet burials. The point is made that the genesis of pet cemeteries was the 19th-century urban experience, which had very few options for pet "disposal," all of them nasty. Things are blessedly different now. Read about it.