irly near to a cluster of stars in the form of a
horseshoe; there is only one fairly bright one in it, and some of the
others are quite small, but yet the horseshoe is distinct and very
beautiful to look at. This is the Northern Crown. The very bright star
not far from it is another first-class star called Arcturus.

To the left of the Northern Crown lies Hercules, which is only mentioned
because near it is the point to which the sun with all his system
appears at present to be speeding.

For other fascinating constellations, such as Leo or the Lion, Andromeda
and Perseus, and the three bright stars by which we recognize Aquila the
Eagle, you must wait awhile, unless you can get some one to point them
out.

Those which you have noted already are enough to lead you on to search
for more.

Perhaps some of you who live in towns and can see only a little strip of
sky from the nursery or schoolroom windows have already found this
chapter dull, and if so you may skip the rest of it and go on to the
next. For the others, however, there is one more thing to know before
leaving the subject, and that is the names of the string of
constellations forming what is called the Zodiac. You may have heard the
rhyme:

'The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,
And next the Crab, the Lion shines,
The Virgin and the Scales;
The Scorpion, Archer, and He-goat,
The Man that holds the watering-pot,
The Fish with glittering tails.'

This puts in a form easy to remember the signs of the constellations
which lie in the Zodiac, an imaginary belt across the whole heavens. It
is very difficult to explain the Zodiac, but I must try. Imagine for a
moment the earth moving round its orbit with the sun in the middle. Now,
as the earth moves the sun will be seen continually against a different
background--that is to say, he will appear to us to move not only across
our sky in a day by reason of our rotation, but also along the sky,
changing his position among the stars by reason of our revolution. You
will say at once that we cannot see the stars when the sun is there, and
no more we can. But the stars are there all the same, and every month
the sun seems to have moved on into a new constellation, according to
astronomers' reckoning. If you count up the names of the constellations
in the rhyme, you will find that there are just twelve, one for each
month, and at the end of the year the sun has come round to the first
one again. The first