When a man marries a wife, he thinks how happy he will be, and how pleasant it will be keeping house on his own account; but, before the bottom of the family kettle has been scorched black, he will be like a man learning to swim in a field, with his ideas all turned topsy-turvy, and, contrary to all his expectations, he will find the pleasures of housekeeping to be all a delusion.  Look at that woman there.  Haunted by her cares, she takes no heed of her hair, nor of her personal appearance.  With her head all untidy, her apron tied round her as a girdle, with a baby twisted into the bosom of her dress, she carries some wretched bean sauce which she has been out to buy.  What sort of creature is this?  This all comes of not listening to the warnings of parents, and of not waiting for the proper time, but rushing suddenly into housekeeping.  And who is to blame in the matter?  Passion, which does not pause to reflect.  A child of five or six years will never think of learning to play the guitar for its own pleasure.  What a ten-million times miserable thing it is, when parents, making their little girls hug a great guitar, listen with pleasure to the poor little things playing on instruments big enough for them to climb upon, and squeaking out songs in their shrill treble voices!  Now I must beg you to listen to me carefully.  If you get confused and don’t keep a sharp look-out, your children, brought up upon harp and guitar playing, will be abandoning their parents, and running away secretly.  Depend upon it, from all that is licentious and meretricious something monstrous will come forth.  The poet who wrote the “Four Sleeves” regarded it as the right path of instruction to convey a warning against vice.  But the theatre and dramas and fashionable songs, if the moral that they convey is missed, are a very great mistake.  Although you may think it very right and proper that a young lady should practise nothing but the harp and guitar until her marriage, I tell you that it is not so; for if she misses the moral of her songs and music, there is the danger of her falling in love with some man and eloping.  While on this subject, I have an amusing story to tell you.

Once upon a time, a frog, who lived at Kioto, had long been desirous of going to see Osaka.  One spring, having made up his mind, he started off to see Osaka and all its famous places.  By a series of hops on all-fours he reached a temple opposite Nishi-no-oka, and thence by the western road he arrived at Yamazaki, and began to ascend the mountain called Tenozan.  Now it so happened that a frog from Osaka had determined to visit Kioto, and had also ascended Tenozan; and on the summit the two frogs met, made acquaintance, and told one another their intentions.  So they began to complain about all the trouble they had gone through, and had only arrived half-way after all:  if they went on to Osaka and Kioto, their legs and loins would certainly not hold out.  Here was the famous mountain of Tenozan, from the top of which the whole of Kioto and Osaka could be seen:  if they stood on tiptoe and stretched their backs, and looked at the view, they would save themselves from stiff legs.  Having come to this conclusion, they both stood up on tiptoe, and looked about them; when the Kioto frog said—­