The only time it loses these very marked characteristics is when it is drawing in toward the sun, and thus nearing conjunction. At such times we see it each evening lower in the rosy glow of the setting sun, and more and more obscured and changed in color by the surrounding atmosphere. Then it sometimes seems as red as Mercury, and sometimes even twinkles a little in a sort of farewell gaiety as it backs away from us into the rays of the dazzling sun and finally disappears for a time from the evening sky. Proximity to the sun and entanglement in the atmosphere of the horizon has this effect more or less on all the planets, as we know, but it always seems unexpected in Saturn, because it is so out of keeping with his ordinarily large, pale, placid face, which suggests softness and gentleness rather than vivacity. But there is no mistaking the planet even under this aspect if we but stop to think where he is. And it is through knowing where he is that it is so easy to keep track of Saturn. For nearly two years and a half, on an average, he remains in the same constellation, passing slowly over about one degree a month, or a little more than twelve degrees in a year, occupying almost thirty years in making one circuit through the constellations of the zodiac. One has, therefore, ample time to get well acquainted with him before he has wandered far from the position in which one first found him. For nearly six months each year Saturn shines as an evening star, and, returning each year as he does with such slight changes of position, he comes to have something of the stability of a fixed star. Having seen him one year, we can count on his returning the next only about thirteen days behind time, and but little farther from his original position than twice the distance between the pointers in the Big Dipper. The one degree a month which he travels along the ecliptic is toward the east, except for a little more than two months before opposition, and the same length of time afterward, when he has the slight apparent retrograde motion due to our overtaking and passing him, which has been explained. With Saturn this motion is so slight--only four degrees--that it does not put him much out of position, and it is, in fact, not much noticed except by close observers. He has all the time been going steadily on toward the east (for the retrograde motion is only an apparent motion), and the annual change of twelve degrees in position is always in this direction.