The third event was the birth of the fourth child and only son, Walter. Gay had lately lost a boy, and Lowell’s announcement to him of this birth was tempered by the fact. “I should have written you a note the other day,” he writes, 3 January, 1851, “to let you know that we have a son, only I could not somehow make up my mind to it. It pained me to think of the associations which such news would revive in you. Yet I had rather you should hear it from me than from any one else.... The boy is a nice little fellow, and said (by his mother) to look like me. He was born on the 22d December, and I am doubting whether to name him Pilgrim Father or no. I have offered Maria her choice between that name and Larkin, which last I think would go uncommonly well with Lowell. She has not yet made up her mind. “But now for the tragic part of it. Just after we had got him cleverly born on the 22d, there springs me up an Antiquary (like a Jack in a box) and asserts that the Pilgrims landed on the 21st, that eleven days were added instead of ten in allowing for O. S., and that there is no use in disputing about it. But I appeal to any sensible person (I have no reference to antiquaries) whether, as applied to Larkin, this decision be not of the nature of an _ex post facto_ law, by which he, the said Larkin, ought not of right to be concluded. What was he to know of it in his retirement, with no access to reading-rooms or newspapers? Inheriting from his father a taste for anniversaries, no doubt he laid his plans with deliberation, and is he now to give up his birthright for a mess of antiquarian pottage? Had proper notice been given, he would surely have bestirred himself to have arrived a day earlier. On the whole I shall advise Larkin to contest the point. For my part, I shall stick to the 22d, though it upset the whole Gregorian calendar, which to me, indeed, smacks a little too strongly of the Scarlet Woman. Would [Illustration: _Mrs. Charles Lowell_] not the Pilgrim Fathers have sworn to the 22d, if they had known that ever a Pope of Rome would go for the 21st? Surely the Babe Unborn should not suffer for the want of accurate astronomical knowledge in them of old time. That other mythological character, the Oldest Inhabitant, should rather be held responsible as approaching nearer to a contemporaneousness with the guilty. However, till this matter is settled, I shall keep it to myself whether the 21st or the 22d were the day of his kindly nativity.”[89]