tomorrow; and it is our mutual desire that you should perform the ceremony", he wrote. Both were considered relatively old for marriage (she was 32 and he was five days past his 38th birthday), but the coupling proved happy for both of them. Immediately after their wedding, they rented and moved into The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. The next day, Hawthorne wrote to his sister, Louisa: "We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point." Together the couple etched their impressions of their new married life in the glass of a window in the study using Sophia's diamond ring: Man's accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843 Nath Hawthorne This is his study The smallest twig leans clear against the sky Composed by my wife and written with her diamond Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. In the Gold light. SAH On their first wedding anniversary, Nathaniel wrote to Sophia: "We were never so happy as now—never such wide capacity for happiness, yet overflowing with all that the day and every moment brings to us. Methinks this birth-day of our married life is like a cape, which we have now doubled and find a more infinite ocean of love stretching out before us." The Hawthornes' first child was born March 3, 1844, after a difficult 10-hour delivery. They named her Una, a reference to The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, to the disapproval of many family members. Sophia wrote in her journal, "It was a great happiness to be able to put her to my breast immediately and I thanked Heaven I was able to have the privilege of nursing her." John L. O'Sullivan served as her godfather and gave her a Newfoundland dog named Leo when she was two months old. Nathaniel wrote that fatherhood brought "a very sober and serious kind of happiness", and the family began to worry about money. Sophia also had a recurrence of her migraines after Una's birth. The family was soon kicked out of the Old Manse, left with only 10 dollars. They moved in with family on Herbert Street in Salem while Nathaniel awaited a government job appointment. In March, 1846, Sophia moved to 77 Carver Street in Boston to be closer to family and