Even the ritual of the lying-in visit, associated with childbirth, was not spared Steen's parodying brush. In the Twin Birth Celebration he depicts a hilarious and witty scene of a flustered elderly father who is mocked by a throng of clamorous women as he receives his newborn twins. Steen's old man must be impotent since common wisdom held that the aged were infertile and therefore completely incapable of having sired one infant, let alone two. A younger, virile man must have fathered them as the old fool, much to his consternation, has suddenly realized.
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