“But before the two days were gone he began to feel very differently, and so did every one else. They talked and they talked, and suggested and consulted, and hunted, and went back and hunted again and again in all the places they had searched before; and every one almost began to look suspiciously at every one else.
“And it would have made any one’s heart ache, to see Little Bear. No one blamed him, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was his fault, and he wanted his dear Star, too. So he mourned and drooped, and all the sparkle went off from his beautiful soft fur, and out of his bright eyes; and when Perseus offered to let him take the Gorgon’s head to play with, he didn’t even care for that.
“Cassiopeia took him up into her chair beside her, and sang little songs to him. The one about the fishes, that he always liked.”
“What song?” asked the Kitten, quickly.
ORION
“Orion was a mighty hunter,” she explained. “This is the way he would attack a lion or any wild creature, without the slightest fear. But he died at last from the bite of a scorpion. The Scorpion is in the sky too, spread out very glittering—a lobstery-kind of a thing—but never at the same time as Orion, because that wouldn’t be good manners. So, sometimes we see Orion marching across, with his two dogs, Sirius and Procyon; then we see the Scorpion, but never the two together.”
And she couldn’t draw the dogs near him, where they belonged, because the Kitten had stepped there; they had to move along to a place where the sand was smooth.
“This,” answered the Princess:—
There are just as good fish in the sea—the sea
As ever came out (they say);
But the finest fish that ever were there