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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
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