If you’re disappointed you didn’t win the Powerball jackpot, head over to NPR to read Charles Dickens’s account of the lottery in Naples, an event he seemed to find both amusing and horrifying:

Dickens heard of a man being thrown fatally from his horse, only to be pounced on by a punter—a person who places a wager—who begged him, “If you have one gasp of breath left, mention your age for Heaven’s sake, that I may play that number in the lottery.”