it be when you see leaves on the fig-tree top as large as the print of
a crow's foot--but even so the thing is desperate.

For me, I praise it not, nor like at all--
'Tis a snatcht thing--mischief is bound to fall.

Then there's marriage, certainly the greatest venture of all. Don't
think of it until you are rising thirty, anyhow. And as for _her_:

Let her be four years woman, and no more;
In her fifth year take her, and shut the door
Till she is yours, enured to your good laws.
Take her from near at hand and give no cause
That neighbours find your wedding stuff for mirth:
Than a good wife no better thing on earth;
Than a bad one, what worse? Pot of desire,
That roasts her husband up without a fire!

That would make her sixteen or thereabouts. Poor child! But neither
Homer, nor Hesiod, nor any Greek I ever read had any mercy on women.
Hesiod in more than one page lets you know what he thinks about them.
It comes hardly from one who in the _Eoioe_(if those apostrophes are
his) was to hymn the great women of history and myth; but there, I
think, spoke the courtier Hesiod, and not the husbandman.

Lastly come a mort of things which you must not do. Here are some--for
some must be omitted from the decorous page:

Let not your twelve-year-old presume to sit
On things not to be moved. That's bad. His wit