The nurse thinks it was Sunday, the surgeon thinks it was Tuesday.

The child will never know its own birthday.

It will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently.

This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible.
Every one in the ship says so.

And this is not all--in fact, not the worst.