"D'you see that reddish star? That's Betelgeuse--Arabic _beyt al agoos_, 'the old man's house.' Betelgeuse is a sun like our own, but a cooling one, and represents the left shoulder of Orion, Bellatrix, supposed to be a lucky star for women, being the right shoulder. Those three bright stars in a line are the hunter's belt, whilst below is Rigel--Arabic _rigl_, 'a foot'--being Orion's left foot. "That big star of a delicate green is Sirius, the blazing dog-star, Orion's great hunting dog." "So!" drawled Broncho with a slow smile. "Smell-dawg or tree-dawg?"[1] "Sirius," went on Jack, taking no notice of Broncho's facetiousness, "is the brightest star in the heavens, though not the biggest. Canopus, though only half as bright, is immeasurably bigger; but if it were as near to us as Sirius I expect it would shine in the sky with as great a brilliance as our sun. "Now, at the least computation, Sirius is fifty billion miles off, or five hundred and thirty-seven thousand times as far from the earth as the sun; and since light diminishes as the square of the distance increases, the sun, if as far off as Sirius, would give us two hundred and eighty-eight thousand million times less light than it does now. "The character of Sirius' spectrum shows that, surface for surface, its brightness is far greater than the sun's, and as Sirius is some twenty times the size of the sun, Sirius is reckoned to shine some seventy times as bright as the sun. This is putting the calculation at its smallest. Good authorities put Sirius at twice that distance off, and calculate the star's brilliancy as two hundred and eighty-eight times greater than the sun's.[7] Now, when you come to contemplate Canopus----" "Hold on, son! Hold your horses there!" burst out Broncho, drawing a long breath. "Sirius is a size too large for this child. My brain's dizzy an' wobblin' with them Sirius calc'lations o' yours, an' if you turns your wolf loose on this Canopus star, compared to which you allows Sirius is merely a puny picaninny, you'll shore have me that locoed an' brain-strained, tryin' to size up them measurements o' yours, I'd be liable to dislocate my mental tissues an' stampede away into a lunatic complete." "Well, you needn't worry; astronomers are beaten by Canopus." "If you-alls aims to surprise me by that statement, you don't succeed. I bet a stack o' blues them astronomy sharps goes locoed or beds down in their coffins 'fore they has time to round up the tally o' Canopus," declared the cowpuncher. "He's so far off," continued Jack impressively, "that if they used up all the oughts in the world, they couldn't get his distance down on paper." "Tell us some more about Sirius," said Curly, his eyes bulging with Jack's stupendous statements.