There are forty-eight well known constellations, but of these only about a dozen are easy to know. I think a dozen is quite enough for children to learn. And therefore, I shall tell you how to find only the showiest and most interesting. The best way to begin is to describe the ones that you can see almost every night in the year, because you may want to begin any month in the year, and you might be discouraged if I talked about things nobody could see in that month. There are five constellations you can nearly always see, and these are all near the Pole star. Doubtless you think you know two of them already--the Big and the Little Dipper. Ah, I forgot to tell you that these dippers are not the real thing. They are merely parts of bigger constellations and their real names are Great Bear and Little Bear. The oldest names are the right ones. Thousands of years ago, when the Greeks named these groups of stars, they thought they looked like two bears. I can't see the resemblance. But for that matter all the figures in the sky are disappointing. The people who named the constellations called them lions, and fishes, and horses, and hunters, and they thought they could see a dolphin, a snake, a dragon, a crow, a crab, a bull, a ram, a swan, and other things. But nowadays we cannot see those creatures. We can see the stars plainly enough, and they do make groups, but they do not look like animals. I was greatly disappointed when I was told this; but I soon got over it, because new wonders are always coming on. I think the only honest thing to do is to tell you right at the start that you cannot see these creatures very well. You will spoil your pleasure unless you take these resemblances good-naturedly and with a light heart. And you will also spoil your pleasure if you scold the ancients for naming the constellations badly. Nobody in the world would change those old names now. There is too much pleasure in them. Besides, I doubt if we could do much better. I believe those old folks were better observers than we. And I believe they had a lighter fancy. Let us, too, be fanciful for once. I have asked my friend, Mrs. Thomas, to draw her notion of some of these famous creatures of the sky. You can draw your idea of them too, and it is pleasant to compare drawings with friends. There is only one way to see anything like a Great Bear. You have to imagine the Dipper upside down and make the handle of the Dipper serve for the Bear's tail. What a funny bear to drag a long tail on the ground! Miss Martin says he looks more like a chubby hobby-horse. You will have to make the bowl of the Dipper into hind legs and use all the other stars, somehow, to make a big, clumsy, four-legged animal. And what a monster he is! He measures twenty-five degrees from the tip of his nose to the root of his tail. Yes, all those miscellaneous faint stars you see near the Big Dipper belong to the Great Bear. [Illustration: Orion fighting the Bull. Above are Orion's two dogs]