It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in a rare book of some 200 years ago, _Meteorologiae_, speaks of Aquarius by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius. But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the _Seasons_ (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it--so that ‘benign’ and not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet. All these ‘watery constellations’--Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces--are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky--the clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset of winter--the Lords of Rain--‘sad companions of the turning year’ as an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides, ‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the ‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in Tennyson’s “Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea.” Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously ‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six storm-stars are torches set apart. Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and ‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the Children of Water.