As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on a new significance for pastoral and other lonely peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all. Songs and poems and legends make it familiar to everyone. A hundred tales own it as a mysterious background, as Brocéliande is the background of a hundred Breton ballads, or as Avalon is the background of a hundred romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt. The Hebridean islanders seldom look at it on still frosty nights without in the long idle hours recalling some old name or allusion, some ancient _rann_ or _oran_, some _duan_ or _iorram_ of a later day, related to the mystery and startling appealing beauty of the Silver Road. It has many names on the lips of these simple men, who have little learning beyond the Bible and what life on the waters and life in the hearts of other simple men and women have taught them. Sometimes these names are beautiful, as ‘Dust of the World’ (or universe, _an domhain_) or the ‘Kyle of the Angels’ (the Strait or Sound): sometimes apt and natural, as ‘the Herring Way,’ and ‘the Wake’: sometimes legendary, as ‘the Road of the Kings’ (the old gods, from Fionn back to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as ‘the Pathway of the Secret People’: sometimes sombre or grotesque, as ‘The Shroud’ or as ‘the Bag of the Great Miller.’ There is especial interest for us, of course, in the legendary associations of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic peoples. These, in common with the majority of western nations, image the Milky Way more as a ‘road’ or ‘street’ than as a serpent or than as a river--though the Norse have their _Midhgardhsormr_, connected in association with the _Weltum-Spanner_ (‘Stretcher-round-the-World’) or Ocean-Stream. I do not know when the Milky Way as a designation first came into common English use. Possibly there is no prior mention to that in Chaucer’s _Hous of Fame_: “_Se yonder, lo, the Galaxyë, Which men clepeth the Milky Wey_” --an allusion which certainly points to already familiar usage. It is now, I fancy, almost universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden was among the first to popularise it, with his rendering of the Latin _Via Lactis_ and _Via Lactea_ as ‘the Mylke way’ and ‘Mylke whyte way.’ There has been no need to derive the term from the Italian _Via lattea_ or the French _Voie lactée_, since Eden’s use and Chaucer’s preceded that of any French poet or romanticist. Certainly the phrase became part of our literature after it passed golden from the mint of Milton (paraphrasing Ovid)-- “Broad and ample road whose dust is gold, And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest Powdered with stars....”