MY CREED. 



SO NOT keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed 

 up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. 

 Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear 

 them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier 

 by them; the kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say 

 before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffins, send 

 to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my 

 friends have alabaster boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of 

 sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my dead body, 

 I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled 

 hours, and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them 

 while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a 

 flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness 

 of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand 

 for their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the troubled 

 spirit. Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over life's 

 weary way. 



Always for Dogs — Faithfully yours 



