As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they enshrine. ‘Seamen’s starres’ our own King Jamie called them, after the popular use. The Finns call them ‘the Sieve,’ and the Provençals ‘the mosquito net,’ and the Italians ‘the Battledore.’ With the nomad Arabs they are ‘the Herd of Camels.’ Peoples so apart as the ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks of Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called them ‘the Dancers’: to the Solomon Islanders they are ‘a group of girls,’ and (strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the Australian aborigines thought of them as ‘Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing.’ There is perhaps no stranger name than our Gaelic _Crannarain_ (though _Grioglachan_ or _Meanmnach_ is more common), _i.e._, the baker’s peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker and his wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth. But an end to this long excerpting from ‘starry notes’! In a later chapter, too, I propose to write of ‘Winter Stars,’ and the Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way--and I must take warning in time to condense better and write ‘more soothly’ as Chaucer has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation from Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s preface to his _Greek Birds_, to which I have alluded in a footnote. ‘As the White Doves came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile, so over the sea and the islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names. And our Aryan studies must not blind us to the presence in an Aryan tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or from the nameless and forgotten language that was spoken by the gods.’ Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month! What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd looked up from the illimitable desert and called this dim cluster, this incalculable congregation of majesty and splendour, _Al Najm_, ‘the Constellation’ ... ‘_the_ Constellation’: since the first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit Sahara to bow before _Al Wasat_, the Central One: since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set, changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives ... for not long ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and named them newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace. THE RAINY HYADES “Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”