“Fine!” laughed Uncle Henry, “but I warn you that he won’t come when you call him as well as the real live ‘Rags’ answers to his name.”
“Where do I start?” inquired Paul, anxious to have his chance to draw.
“At the feet of the twins,” directed Uncle Henry. “Draw a line through their feet and extend it away from the feet of Pollux, in the direction away from Taurus, the bull. ([26]) At a point about as far away from the foot of Pollux as the height of the twins you will find a bright star, and between it and the foot of Pollux a fainter one. Draw a line to connect them, and you have the little dog’s backbone. You can fill in the rest of him any way you like, for those are the only two stars he has in him. I’ll tell you one thing, though. The brighter star is at the little dog’s tail instead of his head. The opposite was the case with Orion’s dog.”
The children found the two stars very easily and Paul put down dots of the right size to represent them. Then he drew the outline of the little sky dog, making him an Airedale, as you can see, so that he might be the same as his beloved flesh and blood name-sake “Rags.”
“Now that we’ve found the two dogs, that makes it easy to find Cancer the Crab,” said Uncle Henry. “Just draw a line from Sirius, in the Big Dog, through the Little Dog, and extend it almost as far again. ([27]) That’s right. Now what do you see?”
The children searched the sky for some time, and Betty finally said, “Sort of a sprawly bunch of six or eight rather faint stars.”
“Make little chalk-dots for them, then, Betty, and we’ll try our best to make them look like a crab.”
This shows how Cancer the crab looked when he was finished on the blackboard, and how he crawls in the sky away from Canis Major and Gemini, the twin boys. Perhaps he has learned by experience to leave boys and dogs as far behind as possible.
