After the children had looked at all the four maps as long as they wanted to, Uncle Henry suddenly remembered to look at his watch and exclaimed, "My goodness! I guess it's about time the Society adjourned for to-night. Ten o'clock! I'll get scolded for keeping you up so late." "I want to ask just one thing more," pleaded Betty. "All right, what is it?" said Uncle Henry. "Who found all the sky people?" "Well," said Uncle Henry, "now that's a long story. They were all found and named so long ago that nobody knows who did it. The inventors of the star people naturally thought they saw pictures in the sky of the things they were familar with in everyday life--the bear, the bull, the serpent, the archer, and so on. If they had had any steam engines then somebody would have drawn lines from star to star until they had a picture of one in the sky. In England the Great Bear or Dipper is usually called the 'Plough' and you can see why [Illustration] "It is also called 'Charles' Wain' or wagon. [Illustration] "We only know that the constellations are very, very old, and that an ancient people living in the valley of the Euphrates river probably named most of them. The Babylonian Tablets, the oldest records known, show that the Zodiac constellations were known over 3000 years before the birth of Christ, which is now nearly 5000 years ago." "Can't we have just one more poem before we go to bed?" said Paul. "Yes," said Uncle Henry, "but not one of mine. I'll give you a little bit of a long poem that was written by a man named _Aratos_ about 280 years before the wise men followed the star that told them where to find the new-born Christ. It has been running through my mind all the evening. This is it: "And all the signs through which Night whirls her car, From belted _Orion_ back to _Orion_ and his dauntless Hound, And all _Poseidon's_, all high _Zeus's_ stars, Bear on their beams true messages to man." FOURTH WINTER EVENING IN WHICH THE "SOCIETY" MEETS THE LAST OF THE STAR PEOPLE AND THE BEGINNING OF ASTRONOMY--AND BETTY PROPOSES A "NOTE" OF THANKS The Society of Star-Gazers assembled upon the roof the next night with an eagerness that was tempered a little by regret that it _was_ the last. Uncle Henry saw this, and before starting to find the evening's constellations with the children, told them a few of the many wonderful things to be seen among the stars with the aid of a small telescope. He reminded them of the "little cloud" in _Andromeda_, called the Great Nebula, and said that there were not only many more of these wonderful clouds of star dust, but numbers of beautiful double stars, some of them lovely with tints of red, green or orange, and some that can be seen with an ordinary opera-glass.