Wren and the pigeons became lifelong friends. For the rest of his life, England’s most esteemed architect never went anywhere without a pigeon close at hand to advise him. Even after he died, the birds went to visit him, now and again, in the land below. To this day, you’ll find the cathedral they built still towering over London, peculiar pigeons keeping watch.

The Girl Who Could Tame Nightmares

Once there was a girl named Lavinia who wanted nothing more than to become a doctor like her father. She had a kind heart and a sharp mind and she loved helping people. She would have made an excellent doctor—but her father insisted it wasn’t possible. He had a kind heart, too, and merely wanted to save his daughter from disappointment; at that time there were no female doctors in America at all. It seemed inconceivable that she would be accepted to a medical school, so he urged her toward more practical ambitions. “There are other ways to help people,” he told her. “You could be a teacher.”

But Lavinia hated her teachers. At school, while the boys were learning science, Lavinia and the other girls were taught how to knit and cook. But Lavinia would not be discouraged. She stole the boys’ science books and memorized them. She spied through the keyhole as her father examined patients in his office, and she pestered him with endless questions about his work. She sliced open frogs she’d caught in the yard to examine their insides. One day, she vowed, she would discover a cure for something. One day she would be famous.

She could never have guessed how soon that day would arrive, or in what form. Her younger brother, Douglas, had always suffered from bad dreams, and lately they’d been getting worse. He often woke up screaming, convinced that monsters were coming to eat him.

“There are no monsters,” Lavinia said, comforting him one night. “Try thinking about some baby animals as you fall asleep, or Cheeky romping in a field.” She patted their old bloodhound, who lay curled at the foot of the bed. So Douglas tried thinking of Cheeky and baby chickens as he fell asleep the following night, but in his dreams the dog turned into a monster that bit the chicks’ heads off, and he woke up screaming once again.

Concerned that Douglas might be ill, their father looked in Douglas’s eyes and ears and throat and checked him all over for rashes, but he could find nothing physically wrong with the boy. The night terrors got so bad that Lavinia decided to examine Douglas herself, just in case their father had missed something.

“But you’re not a doctor,” Douglas protested. “You’re just my sister.”

“Hush up and hold still,” she said. “Now go ahhh.”

She peered into his throat, his nose, and his ears—and deep inside the latter, with the aid of a light, she spied a mass of strange black stuff. She poked her finger in and wiggled it about, and when she removed it, a string of sooty, threadlike stuff was wrapped around the tip. As she pulled her hand away, three long feet of it unraveled from Douglas’s ear.