all be very delightful, and find themselves very much deceived.
If they knew what a sad and cruel world this is, they would not act as
they do. The quotation is from a song of remorse. This sort of thing
but too often happens in the world.

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 live