ses beneath them. It is called Aldebaran, and it, as well as the
Pleiades, forms a part of the constellation of Taurus the bull. In
England we can see in winter below Aldebaran the whole of the
constellation of Orion, one of the finest of all the constellations,
both for the number of the bright stars it contains and for the extent
of the sky it covers. Four bright stars at wide distances enclose an
irregular four-sided space in which are set three others close together
and slanting downwards. Below these, again, are another three which seem
to fall from them, but are not so bright. The figure of Orion as drawn
in the old representations of the constellations is a very magnificent
one. The three bright stars form his belt, and the three smaller ones
the hilt of his sword hanging from it.

[Illustration: ORION AND HIS NEIGHBOURS.]

If you draw an imaginary line through the stars forming the belt and
prolong it downwards slantingly, you will see, in the very height of
winter, the brightest star in all the sky, either in the Northern or
Southern Hemisphere. This is Sirius, who stands in a class quite by
himself, for he is many times brighter than any other first magnitude
star. He never rises very high above the horizon here, but on crisp,
frosty nights may be seen gleaming like a big diamond between the
leafless twigs and boughs of the rime-encrusted trees. Sirius is the Dog
Star, and it is perhaps fortunate that, as he is placed, he can be seen
sometimes in the southern and sometimes in the northern skies, so that
many more people have a chance of looking at his wonderful brilliancy,
than if he had been placed near the Pole star. In speaking of the
supreme brightness of Sirius among the stars, we must remember that
Venus and Jupiter, which outrival him, are not stars, but planets, and
that they are much nearer to us. Sirius is so distant that the measures
for parallax make hardly any impression on him, but, by repeated
experiments, it has now been proved that light takes more than eight
years to travel from him to us. So that, if you are eight years old, you
are looking at Sirius as he was when you were a baby!

Not far from the Pleiades, to the left as you face them, are to be
found two bright stars nearly the same size; these are the Heavenly
Twins, or Gemini.

Returning now to the Great Bear, we find, if we draw a line through the
middle and last stars of his tail, and carry it on for a little
distance, we come fa