The Ram comes rushing in the spring,
His exit is a quieter thing,
Next comes the Bull with heavy tread;
The earth he tosses with his head.
The Heavenly Twins dance through the air,
Their Joy or sorrow makes one stare.
The Crab crawls out of ocean wide,
Behind his rock he'll often hide.
With dignity the Lion stands;
So just and true he rules his lands.
The Virgin holds a sheaf of corn;
Look to your work when she is born,
For next the Balance tried and true
Will weigh the things you ought to do.
What follows is a curious thing,
The Scorpion with his cruel sting.
The Archer next, so wise and wild,
He seems both old man and a child.
The Sea Goat climbs the mountain high,
His motto, "I attain or die."
The Man with Waterpot on high
Pours out his wisdom from the sky.
Lastly two Fishes swim the sea;
They should bring Peace and Unity.
You have all heard about the twelve signs of the
Zodiac, those groups of
stars that form a band around the Earth, through which
the sun seems to pass
during the year and the Moon on her journey every
twenty-eight days.
Tales and legends about the Signs of the Zodiac have
been told for
thousands or years, for they are very, very old, perhaps
older than our
Earth. Children in China, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and
Arabia knew much about
them, and looked up and found them in the sky as you may
do now.
The names the ancient peoples gave them were not
always the same as
ours, but the stories they told about them were similar.
In Babylon, the sign we call the Lion was the Great
Dog, and the Twins
had a shepherd to look after them, to see that they did
not get into
mischief I suppose, as twins often do!
The Chinese picture the Zodiac much as we do, but
they have two Virgins
sitting with their hands folded instead of one, and a
Dragon instead of a
sea goat, and sometimes all the signs are nicely seated
on little stands like
those you see in the shops on old Chinese vases.
You can recognize the same signs too in the Egyptian
pictures, where the
Sea Goat is often depicted as a Crocodile while in
ancient Arabia the Ram,
Bull, and Goat have a god riding on their backs, and the
Fishes have a god
seated between them.
The zodiacal New Year does not begin when ours does
and perhaps you
wonder why the Ram does not "rush in" on January first.
New Year does not start on January first for every
nation, and many
hundreds of years ago it was the custom to celebrate this
at the proper sun
Time—that is, March twenty-first, for the Sun always
says that is the
beginning of the year, in spite of the laws that men
make. The old Romans
recognized this for a long time until one of the Emperors
decided he would
alter the calendar.
The Sun, Moon, and Stars form a giant clock and
calculate their time
just the same whatever we say, and it is not so very long
ago that men in
England, counted their day, month, and year sums so badly
that their time
and the Sun's did not agree, and when they tried to put
it right they had to
lose eleven days to straighten things.
What happened to the children who had birthdays about
that time I do not
know; it is bad enough you will say to have one on
February twenty-ninth in
a Leap Year! However, just to show that the sun knows
better than grown-ups,
he gives you a birthday just the same every year even if
you are born on the
twenty-ninth, only it is not always on the same day.
The stars that make up the groups that are called the
Signs of the
Zodiac can be observed if you will go out on a clear
night; you will see
them best before the Moon has risen, and perhaps the
easiest to find are the
Twins, for the two big stars that are supposed to be on
their heads are
easily seen, one below the other. Not far off you will
find a cluster of
seven small stars called the Pleiades and these are in
the sign of the Bull.
They are sometimes termed the seven sisters and one was
supposed to have
done something wrong and so was shy and hid behind the
others. Unless your
eyes are very keen you cannot see her.
"Is any of the tale true?" you may ask. Well, some of
it is, but which
part you must find out for yourself. If you have a
birthday on the same day
as either Rex's or Zendah's you will find that some of
their adventures will
happen to you either asleep or awake, or you will want to
do many of the
things they loved to do.
Rex and Zendah lived in the country, on the side of a
hill with great
pine trees on the top, which Zendah always said sang the
sun to sleep at night.
Rex thought they were the poles that carried the
fairies' wireless
messages to the star people.
Every morning from their bedroom they could see the
sun rise over the
hill opposite, and at night they often watched the stars
gradually light
their lamps—that is if they happened to be awake!
In the winter they sometimes crept out of bed to peep
at the sparkling
Dog star that comes up over the side of the sky to keep
watch over the Earth
after Orion has drawn his sword and lighted up his belt
for every one to see.
Rex's birthday was on March twenty-seventh, just when
the sun has come
into the sign of the Ram. He was quick and merry with
bright brown eyes and
curly hair, the color of a ripe chestnut. Some of his
boy friends said his
hair was as hot as his temper, but he was never angry for
long.
Zendah's birthday was on November twenty-sixth, when
the Sun is in the
Sign of the Archer. she was fair-haired, with big blue
eyes, and thought it
a great shame that her hair was only wavy and not curly
like Rex's! Her
greatest delight was to ride the little pony given to her
by her father, on
her twelfth birthday.
They both disliked being kept indoors, and they would
rather spend all
their time racing over the country in search of
adventures of one kind or
another.
In the winter they liked sitting by the fire, when
the wind was howling
in the pine trees on the hilltop, and listening to the
stories about birds
and animals that mother told them, or looking through
father's telescope and
trying to learn all the names of the stars. So that when
the Great
Adventure came—but there—you must read it for
yourselves.
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