November 21: Bargains in Wives (Vol. 34, pp. 93-97)

Voltaire came down with smallpox in November 1723, which is why we get today's piece on smallpox innoculation. The ancient Circassians seem to have noticed that innoculating the young with the disease would prevent a worse outbreak down the road, which is why the daughters — in high demand by the sultans — were protected. The supposedly "civilized" culture of Europe took a long time to figure this out.

November 20: Old Stories Ever New (Vol. 17, pp. 90-98)

We get the Grimm brothers' "The Valiant Little Tailor" for today's reading — a guy who turned seven dead flies and a lot of bull and bluster into a kingdom.

The Grimms may not have ever heard of the word, "chutzpah," but the tailor certainly possessed it. On sheer confidence alone, he was able to talk his way into power and riches.

November 19: No Man Knows His Resting Place (Vol. 42, pp. 986-992)

On this day in 1850, Queen Victoria appointed Lord Alfred Tennyson poet laureate. To mark the occasion, we get an exceedingly windy poem, "Morte D'Arthur," on the death of King Arthur. Overwrought nonsense.

November 18: Apple or Son the Arrow's Mark (Vol. 26, pp. 441-449)

On this day in 1307, the most famous shot in the history of archery took place, and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller tells the story today from his play "Wilhelm Tell."

Tell was ordered to prove his prowess with a bow by taking aim from 100 yards away at his son's head, upon which rested an apple. He made the shot, but afterward, Tell told the governor who ordered him to risk his son's life that he had a second arrow reserved for him had his first shot not been true.

Tell may have gotten hauled off to prison for his bravado, but could he have done anything less? Bravery demands words like these.

November 17: At Thirty Scott Began to Write (Vol. 25, pp. 410-420)

This selection from Thomas Carlyle's "Sir Walter Scott" might be considered an ode to the late bloomer. Scott showed no signs of being a literary writer until he was 30. He was living a quiet, orderly life, but within that quiet, orderly life, Carlyle said Scott was building himself into the kind of person who's bound to succeed if given the right opportunity at the right time.

"The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unlettered unconscious part of an unknown proportion; he himself never knows it, much less do others," writes Carlyle. "Give him room, give him impulse; he reaches down to the infinite with that so straitly-imprisoned of his; and can do miracles if need be!"

Not everybody gets this chance, but Scott was fortunate enough to get his and the result was "Ivanhoe " and a flood of other works. Genius is never enough, you have to have the right circumstances to apply it.

November 16: Just Before the Gold Rush (Vol. 23, pp. 164-168)

More from Dana's "Two Years Before The Mast," but this time, our hero is on shore exploring the Presidios of California in the time just before the gold rush of 1849. It's a nice little synopsis of how the Spaniards shaped the early history of California.

November 15: Food Profiteers 300 Years Ago (Vol. 21, pp. 450-460)

You thought you were done with "I Promessi Sposi," didn't you. Sadly, no. There's more of it today. This time, Manzoni writes about bread riots and the mass psychosis of panic that was rampant in Milan during the plague epidemic of the 1600s. The government tried to fix grain prices to discourage profiteering, but it didn't work. The scarcer food got, the more panicked the people got.