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Great Bear   /greɪt bɛr/   Listen
Great Bear

noun
1.
A constellation outside the zodiac that rotates around the North Star.  Synonym: Ursa Major.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Great Bear" Quotes from Famous Books



... sight, Tayoga," replied Willet with energy. "I'm no braggart, I hope, but you Iroquois don't call me Great Bear for nothing. My muscles are as hard as ever, and my wind's as good. I can lift more and carry more upon my shoulders than any other man ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... Waller came first, brushing the snow from his shaggy coat, looking like a great bear, growling as he rolled in, as was his wont. Close behind him, puffing with the run upstairs, and half-hidden behind Waller's broad shoulders, trotted Simmons, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... the Great Bear and the Bull!"—another command for the Hispaniola, for now that the ship was higher, she was passing among the stars, all as perfectly round as so many toy balloons, all marvelously luminous, and each most accommodatingly marked ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... English Fairy Tales). In the days when mythological explanations of folk-tales were popular, Gaston Paris, in a special monograph ("Petit Poucet," Paris 1875) tried to prove that Tom Thumb was a stellar hero because his French name was given to the smallest star in the Great Bear. But it is more likely that the name came from the tale than the tale from ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... saw the lady cut off the choicest parts of the lamb and laying them in a saucepan, throw the rest to a huge great bear, who ate it all to the last bit. When she had made an end of cooking, she ate her fill, after which she set on wine and fruits and confections and fell to drinking, using a cup herself and giving the bear to drink in a basin ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... I am sure I can after being among these people to-night. How much I have that they want! Look at the Great Bear over there! Isn't ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... was turning gray. And never did one of these masters turn south with him. Always it was north, north with the white man first, north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan, until in the end the dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimo igloo on the Great Bear. But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Here and there, as the years passed, one would find among the Eskimo trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired, powerful-jawed giant that was alien to the arctic stock, and in these occasional aliens ran the ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood

... to hunt along for driftwood, when, their eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, they found a pile of wood in the corner of the cave, which satisfied them that at some time in the past this cave had been used by robbers or pirates, who probably had been driven away by this great bear, or possibly might even have been eaten ...
— Tommy Trots Visit to Santa Claus • Thomas Nelson Page

... the sky along the path which we know as the Milky Way, but which the ancient Germans designated as Irmin's Way. This chariot, whose rumbling sound occasionally became perceptible to mortal ears as thunder, never left the sky, where it can still be seen in the constellation of the Great Bear, which is also known in the North ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... the timbers of whalers, to sustain the shock of icebergs. All braces placed diagonally across the hold of any vessel, to support the bilge and prevent loose-working, are called pointers. Also, the general designation for the stars {a} and {b} in the Great Bear, a line through which points nearly upon ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... property and pursued his course. The Danes swarmed into Dalecarlia after him. He disguised himself as a woodcutter, and lived as such. One day he met in the woods a giant Dalesman named Liss Lars, and, as they were chatting together, a great bear attacked Gustavus. After a fierce battle Lars slew the brute with a blow of his axe. The two woodcutters became friends, and Lars got his companion a place under the same master as himself, where Gustavus remained a whole winter unsuspected. Often he himself ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... once more found ourselves in our own Northern hemisphere—nearer to our native country, though the course by which we must reach it would be still longer than that we had traversed. Our old acquaintance the Great Bear showed himself once more, and we looked upon him with joy, as though he had brought intelligence ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue

... that night at Hauskuldstede, and roused all his household, "I will tell you my dream," he said. "I thought I saw a great bear go out of this house, and I knew at once this beast's match was not to be found; two cubs followed him, wishing well to the bear, and they all made for Hrutstede, and went into the house there. After that I woke. Now I wish to ask if any of you saw ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... faith—united to say to him: "What you thought, others have thought also; you are too small, this truth is too great, to exist only in you. The light that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others. See where now the Great Bear inclines to the horizon,—millions of eyes are looking at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes a bond ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... made find G.F.F.F.S. walked towards her palatial paternal mansion. She felt slightly timid, for, as she looked at the heavens, she saw that ARCTURUS, who had been playing tag with CASTOR and POLLUX all the evening, had reached hunk, the Great Bear. From the astronomical knowledge which she had acquired at the Vavasour Female Academy, she knew that the paternal turnip now pointed to the witching ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various

... etc.—have an appearance of youth; so that the traveller would hardly suppose them to be more than a few years old, at first sight. Really this juvenile appearance is a species of second childhood; for, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake, four centuries are necessary for the growth of a trunk not as thick as a man's wrist. The further north the more lamentably decrepit becomes the appearance of these woodlands, until, presently, their sordidness is ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... country, by its closeness of language as much as of position, includes Sweden and Norway, I will record their divisions and their climates also as I have those of Denmark. These territories, lying under the northern pole, and facing Bootes and the Great Bear, reach with their utmost outlying parts the latitude of the freezing zone; and beyond these the extraordinary sharpness of the cold suffers not human habitation. Of these two, Norway has been allotted by the choice of nature a forbidding rocky site. Craggy ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... and the Great Bear (also called the Dipper and the Pointers), should be known to every boy as they are to every Indian. The Pointers always point out the {69} Pole-star. Of course, they go around it once in twenty-four hours, so this makes a ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... the legend of the Great Bear, the Middle Bear, and the Little Tiny Small Bear, and had even proved, in a learned paper, that the Three Bears were the Sun, the Moon, and the Multitude of Stars in the Aryan myth. But he had not seen the pantomime ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... 73—78. Gebelin, Hist. du Calendrier, p. 73,) which Mahomet had studied. 3. The golden chariot does not exist either in science or fiction; but I much fear Dr. Johnson has confounded the Pleiads with the great bear or wagon, the zodiac with a northern constellation:— ''Ark-on q' hn kai amaxan epiklhsin ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... frag. 1: [1402] The Great Bear.]—Hesiod says she (Callisto) was the daughter of Lycaon and lived in Arcadia. She chose to occupy herself with wild-beasts in the mountains together with Artemis, and, when she was seduced by Zeus, continued some time undetected by the goddess, but afterwards, when she was already with child, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... following accidental circumstance enables us to dispense with both calculation and watch. The right ascension of the star [eta] Ursae Majoris, that star in the tail of the Great Bear which is farthest from the "pointers," happens to differ by a little more than 12 hours from the right ascension of the Pole star. The great circle which joins the two stars passes therefore close to the pole. When the Pole star, at a distance ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... America is the water-system of the largest of the rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, a system which comprises the Rivers Peel, Dahodinni, and the Riviere aux Liards, tributaries to the McKenzie, as well as the Great Bear Lake, the Great Slave Lake, and Lake Athabaska; a vast tract, and one which is almost wholly occupied by a population belonging to one and the same class; a class sometimes known under the name Chepewyan, or Chepeyan, sometimes under that ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham

... too," replied his father; "but we must have been mistaken, I suppose. Of course, they could have got behind Great Bear and then kept along ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... at the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... smoke curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge saying, "Nemesho,[65] help us. We claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us." "Sit down and eat, my grandchildren," said the old man. "Who is a great Manito?" said he, "there is none but me; but let me look," and he opened the door of the lodge, when lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. He closed the door. ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... recovered; and he himself was happy, or, at least, he put on all the trappings of happiness; for, in a huge deer-skin Esquimaux dress, which he had brought from Greenland, he danced at his sister's wedding until the great bear had set in the sea, and the autumn sun began to peer through the shutters of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... him about the different animals and how to trap and shoot them, and lastly he taught him about the stars and the stories connected with them. Little Mus-kin-gum could point out the Dipper or Great Bear, the Little Bear, how the last star but one in the Dipper—the star at the bend of the handle—is called 'Mizar,' one of the horses; and just above tucked close in is a smaller star—'Alcor' or 'the rider.' The Indians called these two the 'Old Squaw and the ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... Arcady Or Tyrian Cynosure; here put by synecdoche for 'lode-star.' More particularly, the star of Arcady signifies any of the stars in the constellation of the Great Bear, by which Greek sailors steered; and 'Tyrian Cynosure' signifies the stars comprising that part of the constellation of the Lesser Bear which, from its shape, was called Cynosura, the dog's tail (Greek kynos oura), and by which Phoenician or Tyrian sailors steered. ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... the Syracuse Journal:— Clark's "History of Onondaga," Vol. 1, page 43, near the bottom, says:—"The Quis-quis, or great hog, was another monster which gave the Onondagas great trouble, as did also the great bear, the horned water-serpent, the stone giants, and many other equally fabulous inventions, bordering so closely upon the truly marvelous, that the truth would suffer wrongfully if related in full; but nevertheless are found among the wild and unseemly ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.

... Native Constable Ilavinik and Corporal W. V. Bruce were those who were in at the end when two Eskimo men, Sinninsiak and Uluksak, were arrested by them at Coronation Gulf as the self-confessed murderers of the two priests. Leaving Great Bear Lake in April, 1916, La Nauze, Wight and Ilavinik reached Coronation Gulf a month later and here they met Corporal Bruce, who had been sent out by Inspector Phillips from Herschell Island to gather information that would help to locate ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... hurry of the great city, where she had, notwithstanding her quiet country life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. Her poem on 'Corsica' had brought her into some relations with Boswell; she also knew Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Here is her description of the 'Great Bear:'— ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)

... and the "three daughters" was a received Jewish name for the Constellation of the Great Bear. Hence the simile derived from this (vol. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... thousand years ago the constellation of the Great Bear or Dipper was a starry cross; a hundred thousand years hence the imaginary Dipper will be upside down, and the stars which form the bowl and handle will have changed places. The misty nebulae are moving, and besides are whirling around in great spirals, some one way, some another. Every ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... "The Pole Star and Ursa Major, or The Great Bear as it is also called, form a shape like a wagon; so in olden times it was called King Charles' Wain. Each star in this constellation is known by a Greek letter. The two stars 'a' and 'b' are called the 'Pointers' because they point ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... horned cattle at times fall victims to this great bear, which usually spring on them from the edge of a clearing as they graze in some mountain pasture, or among the foot-hills; and there is no other animal of which horses seem so much afraid. Generally the bear, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... that in the Arctic Regions, as they call some places, a long way north, where the Great Bear lies all across the heavens, and no sun is up, for whole months at a time, and yet where people will go exploring, out of pure contradiction, and for the sake of novelty, and love of being frozen—that ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... expedition reached Fort Chepeywan once again in July, 1825, and pressed onto the Great Bear Lake; then, following the river which runs out of it to the Mackenzie River, they took up winter quarters; but, as there was still time to explore a little, Franklin descended the Mackenzie to the sea, and returned to the Fort (Franklin) ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... immense distance, are in reality great and shining suns. If we were to escape from the earth into space, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually the sun would become invisible. Mizar, the middle star in the tail of the Great Bear, is forty times as heavy as the sun. To the naked eye there are five or six thousand of these ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... made a great difference in the aspect of the chamber, under the full sanction of the lords of the castle. Wolf, deer, and sheep skins abounded; and with these, assisted by her father and old Hatto, she tapestried the lower part of the bare grim walls, a great bear's hide covered the neighbourhood of the hearth, and cushions were made of these skins, and stuffed from Ursel's stores of feathers. All these embellishments were watched with great delight by Ermentrude, who had never been made of so much importance, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Ursa Major (the Great Bear) is not only useful to find the north star, but its position, when the pointers will be vertical in the heavens, may be estimated with sufficient accuracy to determine the north even when the north star can not be seen. In tropical latitudes, the zodiacal stars, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... warrior! Hush, dearie! 'Twas only a hunter whistling, or the night hawk, or the raccoon! Hush, little Eric! Warriors never cry! Hush! Hush! Or the great bear will laugh at you and tell his cubs he's found a coward!" crooned Miriam, making as though she neither heard, nor saw the squaw; but Eric opened his mouth and roared lustily. And the little lad unconsciously foiled the squaw; for she presently took herself off, evidently thinking ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... That lit the revellers down below, When the nights were long, and the moon was low You might have heard, far-off and sweet, The sound of the elfin revelries, Like a bugle strain blown over seas, And the patter and beat of dancing feet,— If you had been like me awake, What time the Great Bear seems to shake, Down through the trackless realms of air, Frost-lances from his shaggy hair; And all around—beneath—across, The round globe lies stabbed through ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... out gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small ivory gull. Another time during the same sledge journey we heard from the tent in which we rested the cook, who was employed outside, cry out: "A bear! a great bear! No! a reindeer, a very little reindeer!" The same instant a well-directed shot was fired, and the bear-reindeer was found to be a very small fox, which thus paid with its life for the honour of having for some moments played the part of a big animal. From these accounts it may be seen how ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... a clear night, when we look up into the starlit sky, it would bewilder us to try and remember all the stars, so we learn first to know those that are most easily recognised—the Plough, or the Great Bear, as they shine with a clear steady light against the background of a thousand ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman

... generally without a compass. The Indian pilot directs his course at night by the pole-star, and in the daytime by the sun and the wind. I have seen Guaiqueries and pilots of the Zambo caste, who could find the pole-star by the direction of the pointers alpha and beta of the Great Bear, and they seemed to me to steer less from the view of the pole-star itself, than from the line drawn through these stars. It is surprising, that at the first sight of land, they can find the island of Guadaloupe, Santa Cruz, or Porto Rico; but the compensation ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... brow and examined the gorge. His breath was steady now, and the blood on his leg had ceased to flow, though the scratches the she-bear had made were open and wide. He squatted up and sat staring at the footmarks of the great bear as they came to the gully—they were as wide as his head and twice as long. Then he jumped up and went along the cliff face until the ledge was visible. Here he sat down for some time thinking, while Eudena watched him. Presently she saw the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... Arcas, and placed them in the sky. Callisto became the Great Bear, and Arcas the ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie

... moon comes out and the Great Bear constellation is shining above our heads as though its sole duty in heaven were to light the camp, there is a strong temptation to ramble. I am always sure that I can find the track, or that Salam will be within hail should it be lost. How quickly the tents pass out of sight. The path to ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... Fort, on the shores of Hudson's Bay, where the winter is eight months long, the spirit-of-wine (mercury being useless in so cold a climate) sometimes falls so low as 50 degrees below zero; and away in the regions of Great Bear Lake it has been known to fall considerably lower than 60 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit. Cold of such intensity, of course, produces many curious and interesting effects, which, although scarcely noticed by the inhabitants, make ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... mountains that a Grizzly Bear, who had strolled down to see what these woods were like, found him nosing about his breakfast, which he had just killed. What he said to the Grizzly I don't know, but it couldn't have pleased him, for with a single blow of his heavy paw the great Bear struck him down. That Wolverene will never try to rob ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... the Great Bear, hey? Heap lie; heap no bear; heap nothing, now. Papoose bear no let hisself be trap' that way. ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... Goering, F. Goriosan. Gor Khar, wild ass. Goshawks, black. Gothia (Crimean), its limit and language. Govy, a low caste in Maabar. Goza. Gozurat, see Guzerat. Grail, Buddhist parallel to the Holy. Granaries, Imperial. Grapes in Shan-si. Grass-cloths. Grasso, Donato. Great Bear (Meistre), and Little, force of, and application of these epithets. Great, or Greater Sea (Black Sea). Greece, Bactria's relation to. Greek fire. Greeks, in Turcomania, and Greek tongue in Socotra; possible relic ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... must speak soft," quoth little Garaine, "And still must your footsteps be, For a great bear prowls in the field of the stars, And the moons they have men ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... who is generally correct) have entirely mistaken the country inhabited by the Shoshones. One of them represents this tribe as "the Indians who inhabit that part of the Rocky Mountains which lies on the Grand and Green River branches of the Colorado of the West, the valley of Great Bear River, and the hospitable shores of Great Salt Lakes." It is a great error. That the Shoshones may have been seen in the above-mentioned places is likely enough, as they are a great nation, and often send expeditions very far from their homes; but their ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had watched. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... "True, Great Bear, but if the night comes it, in turn, must yield to the dawn. All things change, as you say, but nothing perishes. The sun tomorrow will be the same sun that we see today. Black night will not take a single ray ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... magic sword, Nothung! But my arm cannot forge it; there is no fire hot enough to fuse its metal! Alas! I shall always be a slave to this boy Siegfried; that is plain." While he lamented thus, Siegfried, himself, ran boisterously into the cavern, driving a great bear before him. The youth was dressed all in skins, wore a silver hunting-horn at his girdle, and he laughed as bruin chased the Mime into ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... the Cowlitz Valley; and we have travelled with him between the Columbia River and Puget Sound, and once stopped at his house over night. It was quite different from the common Indian houses; having pillow-cases trimmed with ruffles and lace, and great bear-skin mats on the door. The baby slept in a little hammock swung from the ceiling. The family were devoted Catholics, and sung matins and vespers, and had pictures and images of saints about the room. We were quite impressed by the advance in civilization which ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... of cities in the far north, that of Bearville, on the shores of Great Bear Lake, in latitude 65 degrees, must not be passed over. Bearville is the metropolis of one of the finest mineral districts in the world, but had it not been for the inexhaustible deposits of all the useful metals in its vicinity, it is probable a city would never have sprung up in such an inhospitable ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... seven large chests of the worst cigars you ever smoked; three pipes of wine that no one would drink, and a great bear, that had been imported from Greenland for the sake of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... like what-d'ye-call'im—Hector's son, as described by Mr. Pope in his 'Iliad'); it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of these gentlemen, and their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... great way in latitude since our vessel had quitted that Chinese furnace, and the constellations in the sky had undergone a series of rapid changes; the Southern Cross had disappeared at the same time as the other austral stars; and the Great Bear, rising on the horizon, was almost on as high a level as it is in the sky above France. The evening breeze soothed and revived us, bringing back to us the memory of our summer-night watches on the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... and stars seemed very close, when she finally had the bed fixed to her satisfaction and stood looking around her. In fact, it seemed as if she could put out her hand and grasp the Great Bear by the tail. Jupiter was just at her left hand, peeking impudently through the branches while she undressed. Down below the tents gleamed ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey

... the stars. When the tree had finished growing, Wainamoinen sang another magic song, so that the moon was caught fast in the tree's branches and obliged to shine there until Wainamoinen should reverse his spell. And then by another spell he made the stars of the Great Bear fast in the tree-top, and then jumped into his sledge and drove on again to his home, with his cap set awry on his head, mourning because he had promised to send Ilmarinen back to the Northland, to forge the ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind

... 2 The Great Bear, called also Charles's Wain (wagon). "Bootes" is the constellation called "The Waggoner," who is said to be "less fatigued" because he drives the wain higher in ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton

... Potentate, whose dominions extend as far as eye can reach, who rideth on the Great Bear, useth the sun as a looking glass, and maintaineth unrivaled control over tides, madmen, and sea-crabs. We, thy liege subjects, have just returned from a voyage of discovery, in the course of which we have landed and taken possession of that obscure little dirty planet, which ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... she pointed one hand in a dramatic fashion toward the heavens. "Only hear the name I have found for you and you will forgive me much, Mollie Mavourneen," she pleaded. "It is a part of our Camp Fire education to study the stars, isn't it? Well, see the Seven Brothers, the Great Bear family forming the Big Dipper in the northern sky. How many of us know that those stars were shot up there to escape the wrath of their terrible brother, Grizzly Bear, according to Indian astronomy. Now see ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook

... the same line of view, but because they are connected physically, revolving round each other. These observations were continued and greatly extended by Herschel II. The elements of the elliptic orbit of the double star zeta of the Great Bear were determined by Savary, its period being fifty-eight and one-quarter years; those of another, sigma Coronae, were determined by Hind, its period being more than seven hundred and thirty-six years. The orbital movement of these double suns ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... cat, his eyes rested upon a triangular banner fastened to the wall. In white against a background of black was a mighty polar bear holding at bay a horde of Arctic wolves. And suddenly the thing he had been fighting to recall came to Carrigan—the great bear—the fighting wolves—the ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood

... hill we'll find the remains of the railway cut, and less than ten miles north of here lies all that's left of Buffalo. Some luck, eh? Cast away, only fifteen miles or so from a place like that. And we might have gone to Great Bear Lake, or to—h-m!—to any other place, for ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... was sitting beside Oo-koo-hoo, we began talking about bear hunting and he said: "My son, some day you, too, may want to become a great bear-hunter, and when you do go out to hunt alone, don't do as I do, but do as I say, for I am growing old and am sometimes careless about the way I approach game." Puffing away at his pipe, he presently continued: "In trailing bear, the hunter's method of approach, of course, depends entirely upon ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... fairly began its present career in the days of Jacob Little, "the great bear of Wall street." He opened an office here in 1822, and by dint of such labor as few men are capable of performing, placed himself at the head of American operators. His credit was good for any amount, and his integrity was unimpeachable. He could sway the market as he pleased, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... Russia, "the Great Bear," whose part in the war brought on internal strife and revolution which robbed Czar Nicholas of his throne, traces its history back for more than ten centuries, when the Norse invaded the territory and founded Veliki Novgorod, for many years one of the chief ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... a name given by the Hindus to seven wise men whose eyes had been opened by the study of the sacred texts of their religion, the souls of whom are fabled to be incarnated in the seven stars of the Great Bear. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the Baboo, with a business-like impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... one respect, anyhow. There was really no reason in the world why Tom should not lie upon the great bear-skin rug in front of the library fire those cold winter nights if he wanted to, nor need anyone be surprised that he should want to. It was indeed a most delightful place to lie in. The bear-skin was soft and in every way comfortable and comforting. The fireplace itself was one ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs

... the form of the constellation called the Great Bear, and moving onward in space causest the lapse of Time. This constellation, in Hindu astronomy, is known by the name of Sisumara because of its resemblance with the form of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... suddenly asked himself this, a confused, painful sense of awe seemed to crush him to the ground. Persistently he gazed at a brilliant star in the tail of the Great Bear and recollected how Kousma the peasant in the melon-field had called this majestic constellation a "wheelbarrow." He felt annoyed, in a way, that such an irrelevant thought should have crossed his mind. He gazed at the black ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... splendid beauty of the Northern night broke over her soul. Straight before her gleamed and flashed and ebbed and palpitated the aurora. One moment its long arms shot beyond the zenith; the next it had broken and rippled back like a brook of light to its arch over the Great Bear. Never for an instant was it still. Its restlessness stole away the quiet of the evening; but left ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down upon us with his golden eyes. We were in close touch with the higher regions of the universe. At the very moment when the play was beginning there gleamed across the upper firmament, and thence went radiantly downward across ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... onwards, madly, blindly, with the headlong rush of a storm. There was no hope for them to keep on the beaten track, and soon Phaeton had his rapture checked by the terrible realisation that they had strayed far out of the course and that his hands were not strong enough to guide them. Close to the Great Bear and the Little Bear they passed, and these were scorched with heat. The Serpent which, torpid, chilly and harmless, lies coiled round the North Pole, felt a warmth that made it grow fierce and harmful again. Downward, ever downward galloped the maddened horses, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... and blue, infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl at home, and hurrah for anything in foreign waters. He joined the stream with a cordial spirit. Since it must be so! The wind of that haughty proceeding of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral brook brushed his cheek unpleasantly. He clapped hands for the fezzy defenders of the border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet to enter the old romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a letter fit for his uncle Everard to read. Then ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... figurative, may not be uninteresting to the reader. They say that a great while ago, their fathers had a long lodge, in the centre of which were ranged four fires. By the first fire stood two chiefs, one on the right, who was called the great Bear, and one on the left, called the little Bear: these were the village or peace chiefs: they were the rulers of the band, and held the authority corresponding to that of the chief magistrate. At the second fire stood two ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake

... so called because this constellation seems to follow the Great Bear as the driver follows his oxen. Bootis is represented as grasping in his right hand a sickle and in his left a club, and is fabled to have been Icarius, who was transported to heaven because he was a great cultivator of the vine; for when Bootes rises the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... tis this: my master and Amadine, walking one day abroad, nearer to these woods than they were used—about what I can not tell—but toward them comes running a great bear. Now my master, he played the man and run away, & Amadine crying after him: now, sir, comes me a shepherd & strikes off the bear's head. Now whether the bear were dead before or no I cannot tell, for bring twenty bears before me and bind their hands & feet and I'll kill them all:—now ever since ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... they all clung to this particular house in a row because its interior was filled with objects always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows. Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint of other matters that she might be able to keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world history in scenes and heads which the children had early learned by heart. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... pa? What makes him be a great bear? Papa-sy, dear," she continued, stroking his face with her little hands, and patting him, very much as Beauty might have patted the Beast after she fell in love with him; or as if he were a great baby. In fact, he began to look ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... there had to be something about her in his dream, and about bleaching the clothes. Father Jansen was there, too, exhibiting to the stars the particular garment that Femke had patched. Orion and the Great Bear admired this specimen of her ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... the Almighty." Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way. Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,—justice, love, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... himself through the little blue door to his own garden. The heavens were clear and starry, and he paused for a moment on the grass-plot, his hands clasped behind him, his head tilted back and his eyes fixed on the Great Bear that hung ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... from Plate 1, that on a spring evening the seven conspicuous stars of this constellation are to be looked for towards the north-east, about half way between the horizon and the point overhead (or zenith), the length of the set of stars being vertical. On a summer's evening the Great Bear is nearly overhead. On an autumn evening he is towards the north-west, the length of the set of seven being somewhat inclined to the horizon. Finally, on a winter's evening, he is low down towards the north, the length of the set of seven stars being ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a monotonous parallelogram of window blind. Neither ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... correspondent of Voltaire, whom she looks upon as a god. She was, by the bye, put into a great rage one day, lately, by a print-seller in the street, who was crying, "Here is Voltaire, the famous Prussian; here you see him, with a great bear-skin cap, to keep him from the cold! Here is the famous Prussian, for six sous!" "What a profanation!" said she. To return to my story: M. de Chenevieres had shewn her some letters from Voltaire, and M. Marmontel had read an ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... response in them. Friendship replies to friendship, and Will, who six months ago would have laughed at the endorsement of blanketed wild men, now felt a thrill of pleasure. But Xingudan as yet said little more. He pointed to the great bear and said: ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... rack for the miners to hang their hats and coats during the school session. Several mottoes, likewise upon the wall, were intended to attract the students' attention, the most conspicuous being: "Live and Learn" and "God Bless Our School." A great bear's skin formed a curtain between the dance-hall and the saloon, while upon the door-frame was a large hand rudely painted, the index-finger outstretched and pointing to the next room. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... toward the doorway. There, silhouetted against the lesser darkness without, he saw the figures of Columbus Blackie and The Oskaloosa Kid and with a growl he charged them. The two were but a few paces outside the doorway when the full weight of the great bear struck Columbus Blackie between the shoulders. Down went the man and as he fell he released his hold upon the youth who immediately turned ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... YOUR WAGON TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,—Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,—justice, love, freedom, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... of a great pine. As soon as he was by it, he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half round, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces. He had heard us, but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were, for he reared up on his haunches ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various

... to the east of British Columbia. These waters are stored for a time in Lake Athabaska, and then under the name of Slave River flow northwards into the Great Slave Lake, and out of this, under the name of Mackenzie River, into Beaufort Sea, through an immense delta. The Great Bear Lake is also ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yueen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius—"goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky," one inscription calls her—and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... 14th.—I was on deck at 4 a.m. The Southern Cross, the Great Bear, and the North Star, were shining with a brilliancy that eclipsed ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... He felt a sort of resentment that these two dirty Indians must be watched, and so break into his much needed rest. He riveted his attention upon the stars, and began to name over the constellations he could see. There was the Great Bear, the trapper's timepiece in the wilderness; and there, almost directly above him and very bright, the North Star, the hunter's compass. Then, there was the Big Dipper, very high, and the Little Bear. Southerly, through the trees, and looking like an arc-lamp suspended there, Sirius gleamed, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... &c.] Putat Cardanus, ab extrema Cauda Halices seu Majoris Ursae omne magnum Imperium pendere.[Cardanus believed that the fate of every great empire depended on the end of the tail of the Thumb or Great Bear] — Idem p. 325. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... into seven Margas, paths or orbits, assigning a particular wind to each. The sixth of these paths is that of the Great Bear, and its peculiar wind is called Parivaha. This wind is supposed to bear along the seven stars of Ursa Major, and to propel ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... thalers, laughingly promising to repeat the prescription whenever Arvid was again wounded at "single-stick." He was greatly pleased to have his friend with him once more, and, when Arvid was strong enough to join in his vigorous sports again, one of the first things he proposed was a great bear-hunt up among the snow-filled forests ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... time for reflection. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him. . . . He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... miles of great ruby dimples: it was the first glowing smile of southern latitude. The night stole on so soft, so clear, so balmy, all were loth to close their eyes on it: the passengers lingered long on deck, watching the Great Bear dip, and the Southern Cross rise, and overhead a whole heaven of glorious stars most of us have never seen, and never shall see in this world. No belching smoke obscured, no plunging paddles deafened; all ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... force. These guests were in a sweat all this while, but out of it falling into a sleep again, it became morning first before they spake their minds; then would they have it to be a dog, yet they described it more to the likeness of a great bear; so fell to the examining under the beds, where, finding only the mats scracht, but the bed-coards whole, and the quarter of beef which lay on the floor untoucht, they ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... Dr. Johnson did not feel mortified and pained to see him eat like an Esquimau, and to hear him call men "liars" because they did not agree with him? He was called the "Ursa Major," or Great Bear. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... night a dreadful sound woke me. I rose and looked out of the window, and heard again, deep and reverberating, Pilot baying I know not what light minions of the moon. The Great Bear wheeled faintly clear in the dark zenith, but the borders of the east were grey as glass; and far away a fierce hound was answering from his echo-place in the gloom, as if the dread dog of Acheron ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... people had seen Crockett, he had obtained very considerable renown in that community of backwoodsmen as a great bear-hunter. Dr. Butler, a man of considerable pretensions, and, by marriage, a nephew of General Jackson, was the rival candidate, and a formidable one. Indeed, he and his friends quite amused themselves with the idea that "the gentleman from ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... this act was not final. The noose enraged him, but did not frighten or disable him. As the great bear of the foothills, when roped by the horseman, scorns to attempt escape, but pulls man and horse toward him by main force, so the giant savage who was now thus assailed put forth his strength, and by sheer power of arm drew his would-be captors to him, hand over hand. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... in its inspiration." And that region, which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology—and as remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales, had there been any Middle Ages—it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... I," said the boy, "neither darkness, nor the great bear, nor the were-wolf. For I am Gundhar's son, and the defender ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear (Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed by Caxton in 1485, a compilation ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... any alteration, but from the 3rd to the 12th they took place during the night, before the statues of Merodach and Ishtar, in turn with those of Nebo and Tashmit, of Mullil and Ninlil, of Eamman and of Zirbanit; sometimes at the rising of a particular constellation—as, for instance, that of the Great Bear, or that of the sons of Ishtar; sometimes at the moment when the moon "raised above the earth her luminous crown." On such a date a penitential psalm or a litany was to be recited; at another time it was forbidden to eat of meat either cooked or smoked, to change the body-linen, to wear white ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... unstable enough, towards my new kingdom, I kickt my servants sleeping without till they howled and ran from me, and called Heaven and Earth to witness that I, Duncan Parrenness, was a Writer in the service of the Company and afraid of no man. Then, seeing that neither the Moon nor the Great Bear were minded to accept my challenge, I lay down again and must ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... them arranging their affairs, and went into another room to attend to some of my own, and after a while my mother came there to me. "I've let him the rooms, Hugh," she said, with a note of satisfaction in her voice which told me that the big man was going to pay well for them. "He's a great bear of a man to look at," she went on, "but he seems quiet and civil-spoken. And here's a ticket for a chest of his that he's left up at the railway station, and as he's tired, maybe you'll get somebody yourself to fetch it down ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... believe that fiery totem speak—that fiery totem call water spirits to torture. Foolish redmen! Foolish chief! But Thunder-maker would see his people a great people. He would see his tribe wise as the fox and brave as the great bear. He would see another chief to rule them—he would see another wear the robes of a chief! So he would blind the eyes of his people. He would say to them: 'Children, you are foolish. The spirits that come from the Silver Waters are not the spirits that the totem ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby

... 108: Scouts of course know the Big Dipper or the Great Bear, and the Little Dipper or the Little Bear, in the sky. The Big Dipper points to the North Star or Pole Star, and the North Star or Pole Star is the star in the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. These two formations up above are the ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin

... white-looking patches made up of countless stars individually unseen to the naked eye, and nebulae—mists of radiating light—all shining brilliantly and revolving around the starless South Pole. To the northward was the constellation of the Great Bear, which reaches its meridian altitude about the same time as the constellations of the Cross and the Centaur. As the boys looked, stars appeared and disappeared. They were like a succession of guests, ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... this species once covered the eastern two-thirds of the continent of North America. It extended from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains, and from Great Bear Lake to Florida and Texas. Eastward of the Mississippi it has for twenty years been totally extinct, and the last specimens taken alive were found in Kansas ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental determinations, be these never so 'true.' Take the 'great bear' or 'dipper' constellation in the heavens. We call it by that name, we count the stars and call them seven, we say they were seven before they were counted, and we say that whether any one had ever noted the fact or not, the dim resemblance to a long-tailed ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... Women, Mars by Wolves, Mercury by Cocks, the Sun by Horses, and Saturn by Serpents; besides the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, and some figures from the forty-eight Constellations of Heaven, such as the Great Bear, the Dog Star, and many others, which, by reason of their number, we must pass over in silence, without recounting them all in their order, since anyone may see the work; which figures are almost all by the hand of Perino. In ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... had plenty of light. Two moons, one at three quarters and the other full, shone brightly, while the water was alive with gymnotuses and other luminous creatures. Sitting and living upon the cross-timbers, they looked up at the sky. The Great Bear and the north star had exactly the same relation to each other as when seen from the earth, while the other constellations and the Milky Way looked identically as when they had so often gazed at them before, and some idea of the immensity of space was conveyed to them. Here was no change; ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace border standing out in contrast against the background of blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagination. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear-skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed-foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touching the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last, suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear. There he saw, with the vision of immortal, not of mortal, eyes, a company of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a circular abyss, but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of these seven ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... House fitted up for His abode and ours. An only prince would be of more consideration than a palace, although its foundation pressed the shoulders of Serpentarius, its turret touched the brow of Orion, and its wings reached from the Great Bear to the Phoenix. So a mind is of more importance than the material creation, and the moral condition of a man is of greater moment than the aspect ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... away up on the Great Bear," he said, "and for ten days and ten nights I was in camp— alone— laid up with a sprained ankle. It was a wild and gloomy place, shut in by barren ridge mountains, with stunted black spruce all about, and those spruce ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... thought, he gazed long and intently upon the heavens. His eyes wandered from where the tail of the Great Bear, now a zodiacal constellation, was scarcely visible above the waters, to where the stars of the southern hemisphere were just breaking on his view. A cry from Ben Zoof recalled ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... a single glance, the Southern Cross and the Great Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebulae of the Gold-fish, the six suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites, and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn! all the planets, all the stars which men should, in future days, discover! He fills his eyes with their light; ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... came too late. As bruin reared himself old Peter's shot rang out. An instant later, with such a cry as never issued from the throat of any bear, he dropped to the veranda floor and lay there motionless. The great bear ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... great bear, you," and she rose to her feet and shook out her skirts. "I wouldn't let you stay, no matter what you said." She was not angry—she was only feeling about trying to put her finger on the particular button that controlled Max's movements. "Worried? Not a bit ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... notice that," said Eve, pertly; "but as for his strength, he certainly is as strong as a great bear, and as rude. What do you think? my lord carried me all the way from the top of the green lane to your house, and I ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... beginning have trailed the beasts of the woods. There is none so cunning as the fox, but we can trail him to his lair. Though we are weaker than the great bear and buffalo, yet by our wisdom we overcome them. The deer is more swift of foot, but by craft we overtake him. We cannot fly like a bird, but we snare the winged one with a hair. We have made ourselves many cunning inventions by which the beasts, the trees, the wind, the ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson

... vexation was perceptible in the tone of her voice. "I don't think much of this explanatory system," continued she, "that they praise so, where the stars are mixed up so that I can't tell Jew Peter from Satan, nor the consternation of the Great Bear from the man in the moon. 'Tis all dark to me. I don't believe there is any comet at all. Who ever heard of a comet without a tail, I should like to know? It isn't natural; but the printers will ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... the very embodiment of good nature and gentle care. And she had good reason for this high regard. But as a great bear has been known to bestow a remarkable affection upon a lost child, notwithstanding its savage nature, so it was with Sam. Could Jean have seen him that night as he led his score of followers against the slashers she would not have believed ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody

... him, which he churns into butyrus, an unguent so efficacious that it cures all maladies under the sun, and many that never existed. It can be had at five shillings a spoonful. He can make Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, dance without a leader, and has taught Pisces, or the Fishes, to live out of water—a prodigy never known or heard of before since the creation of terra firma. Such is the power of the great and celebrated Her Vanderpluckem over the stars and planets. But now to come nearer ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... 'Smith Lars' in partnership have made a great bear-trap, which was put out on the ice to-day. As I was afraid of more dogs than bears being caught in it, it was hung from a gallows, too high for the dogs to jump up to the piece of blubber which hangs as bait right in the mouth of the trap. ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... year, but for short intervals they reckoned by lunations. They had observed and even given names to the principal constellations. Among the Iroquois, the Pleiades were called the "Dancers;" the Milky Way, "the Path of Souls;" the Great Bear had a name corresponding with that which we give it; the Polar Star was designated as "the star that never sets;" it served to guide them in their long marches through the forests and across the great prairies ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... of astronomy, merely because they are not versed in recognising the constellations. For instance, they will say:—"What is the use of my reading anything about the subject? Why, I believe I couldn't even point out the Great Bear, were I asked to do so!" But if such persons will only consider for a moment that what we call the Great Bear has no existence in fact, they need not be at all disheartened. Could we but view this ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... our lines and from the enemy's such a cloud of rockets that they unite and mingle in constellations; at one moment, to light us on our hideous way, there was a Great Bear of star-shells in the valley of the sky that we could see between ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... as he is about to pass, holds out his leg as if to show him something and stops him): In my leg—the calf—there is a tooth Of the Great Bear, and, passing Neptune close, I would avoid his trident's point, and fell, Thus sitting, plump, right in the Scales! My weight Is marked, still registered, up there in heaven! (Hurriedly preventing De Guiche from passing, and detaining ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand

... we imagine a line drawn from the northern side of the circumference (N) to the side which lies above the southern half of the axis (S), and from here another line obliquely up to the pivot at the summit, beyond the stars composing the Great Bear (the pole star P), we shall doubtless see that we have in the heaven a triangular figure like that of the musical instrument which the Greeks call ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... meaning of Latin art reached his heart. Till then Christophe had been entirely indifferent to the work of the Italians. The barbarian idealist, the great bear from the German forests, had not yet learned to taste the delicious savor of the lovely gilded marbles, golden as honey. The antiques of the Vatican were frankly repulsive to him. He was disgusted by their stupid faces, their effeminate or massive proportions, their ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... eye even now upon the mansion of an adjacent ex-premier, the belt of Orion was not oblivious of a belted earl's cosy red-brick home just opposite, and the house of a certain famous actor and actress close by had been taken by the Great Bear under its special protection. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... days' sailing they made out a land ahead, full of trees and dense undergrowth. That was certainly Leif's Markland. South-east of it, at no great distance, there was a large island. They saw a great bear prowling the shore, and gave his dwelling-place the name of Bear Island, out of compliment to him. Karlsefne did not ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett

... great bear clan of many nations, why is the symbol that you wear familiar to me—and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... those about to enter for the public competitive examinations, worshipped as the God of Literature, or as his palace or abode (Wen Ch'ang), the star K'uei in the Great Bear, or Dipper, or Bushel—the latter name derived from its resemblance in shape to the measure used by the Chinese and called tou. The term K'uei was more generally applied to the four stars forming the body or square part of the Dipper, the three forming the tail or handle being called ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... beholding and regretting the rewards enjoyed by the good, and doomed to struggle, till the stars shall cease to shine, in unavailing endeavours to reach the blissful island. They beheld the lake thick and black with the heads of the unhappy swimmers, as the surface of the Great Bear Lake is dotted in summer with the wild fowl that seek subsistence in ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... and see you ch-chk, ch-chk!"—he elongated and twisted his neck, at the same time turning his eyes upwards in a horrible fashion—"while your feet go so ... so,"—he described a species of pas-seul with his toes. "Is that not so, Antoine? Eh?—you beauty, you?" and here he gave the great bear, that had been gravely sitting on its haunches watching him like an attendant spirit, a ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie

... eye can decide the right direction. Then in the night you have the north star, which you know can always be found by drawing an imaginary straight line along the two stars forming the end of the bowl of the Dipper, generally called the Great Bear." ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie

... drowned in this drink of men—I who had never known a mother's breast in the briefness of time I had lived—had it not been for Lingaard. But when he plucked me forth from the brew, Tostig Lodbrog struck him down in a rage. We rolled on the deck, and the great bear hounds, captured in the fight with the North Danes just past, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... is a piece of very good fortune;—at least, for those who like bears' feet for dinner. Somebody or other has lighted upon the great bear that got away in the summer, and poked her out of her den, on the fjelde. She is certainly abroad, with her two last year's cubs; and their traces have been found just above, near the foss. Olaf had heard of ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau

... back in the sixties, had almost started World War Three. An atomic blast had leveled a hundred square miles of the city and started fires that had taken weeks to extinguish. Soviet Russia had roared in its great bear voice that the Western Powers had attacked, and was apparently on the verge of coming to the defense of its Asian comrade when the Chinese government had said irritatedly that there had been no attack, ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett

... or a smile. The full-moon was there, and there was no cloud or haze to obscure her light; but she did not shine. Her white, rayless face was a mockery to the night. The same was true of the stars. The dazzling canopy was faded out, and Cygnus and the Great Bear were subdued to pallid points, like patches of white-gray paper stuck upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... that island, on which occasions they generally lost a part, if not the whole, of their crews, from the savage disposition of the natives. He appeared to be acquainted with several of the constellations, and gave names for the Pleiades, Scorpion, Great Bear, and Orion's Belt. He understood the distinction between the fixed and wandering stars, and particularly noticed Venus, which he named usutat-si-geb-geb or planet of the evening. To Sumatra he gave the appellation of Seraihu. As to religion he said the rajas alone prayed and ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... England's fault. She has done all she could to avoid it. It is the Great Bear of Russia who wants ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... he looked upon the wind-clear northern sky and saw the starry constellations all unchanged. Capella hung in the west, Vega was rising, and the seven glittering points of the Great Bear swept overhead in their ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... guards with its added burden of dried fish and pemican. Then canoe and bateau answered to the swift current of the Mackenzie, and they plunged into the Great Barren Ground. Every likely-looking 'feeder' was prospected, but the elusive 'pay-dirt' danced ever to the north. At the Great Bear, overcome by the common dread of the Unknown Lands, their voyageurs began to desert, and Fort of Good Hope saw the last and bravest bending to the towlines as they bucked the current down which they had so ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... archer, pulling on his clothes, "I have come well out of the business. I would sooner wrestle with the great bear of Navarre." ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... twenty-five small lakes extending towards the north, about one-half of them connected by a river which flows into Slave Lake near Fort Providence. One of the guides named Keskarrah drew the Copper-Mine River running through the Upper Lake in a westerly direction towards the Great Bear Lake and then northerly to the sea. The other guide drew the river in a straight line to the sea from the above-mentioned place but, after some dispute, admitted the correctness of the first delineation. The latter was elder brother to Akaitcho and he said that ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... star in the tail of the Great Bear, one of the "Banat al-Na'ash," or a star close to the second. Its principal use is to act foil to bright Sohayl (Canopus) as in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton



Words linked to "Great Bear" :   constellation, dipper, plough, big dipper, wagon, Charles's Wain, wain



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