January 16: The Old Woman and the Wine Jar (Vol. 17, pp. 31-44)

There are a bunch of Aesop's famed Fables in today's reading, but the focus is on this particular tale, which is short enough to print in its entirety:

You must know that sometimes old women like a glass of wine. One of this sort once found a Wine-Jar lying in the road, and eagerly went up to it hoping to find it full. But when she took it up she found that all the wine had been drunk out of it. Still she took a long sniff at the mouth of the Jar. “Ah,” she cried, "WHAT MEMORIES CLING ROUND THE INSTRUMENTS OF OUR PLEASURE."

The Harvard Classics collects 82 of Aesop's stories, and after more than 2,600 years, they hold up well. Human behavior hasn't changed all that much in a couple of millennia.