offense.  The matter had been reported to the master by a servant, but confirmatory evidence was needed before punishment could follow.  I was torn asunder by passions I could not then analyze and in the end committed the greatest of schoolboy crimes,—­I sneaked.  The action under the circumstances was courageous, but I was indifferent so long as the boy I loved judged me rightly.  The result was that at the close of the term four or five of the senior boys were ‘asked to leave.’  The remaining brief period of my school life, which had previously been a living hell, became really happy.  That this should have been brought about to the harm of four or five boys whose sin, after all, was but a misdirected impulse for which the system was responsible, seems to me now all very wrong.  Of the boys sent away, however, certainly three have made honorable careers.  For my friend and I, we became more afraid of each other than before; as our affections increased, so our fear of them increased also.  The friendship was too ethereal to live; but even yet we still have a deep respect for one another.

“When at the age of 19 I left school I was allowed to knock about for a year before entering college.  During this time I picked up a sexual experience that may or may not have been a valuable one, I certainly look back upon it now, with regret, if not with horror.  My father had discovered, some months before this date, that I was in the habit of masturbating, and he gave me what he conceived to be the right counsel under the circumstances:  ’If you do this,’ he said, ’you will never be able to use your penis with a woman.  Therefore your best plan will be to go with a prostitute.  Should you do this, however, you will probably pick up a beastly disease.  Therefore the safest way would be to do it abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.’  Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny.  The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also gave me his advice on this point.  ‘Masturbation,’ he said, ’is death.  A number of young men come to me with the same story.  I tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill yourself, too.’  The doctor’s hope was apparently to frighten his young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of life, and one went away from him with the impression that every sexual manifestation in one’s self was a physical infirmity, due to one’s own moral weakness.  It took me some time before I could make up my mind to follow my father’s advice, but after a period of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood acted upon it.  I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of ——­ and went home with her.  From something she said to me I know that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again.  This I did twice, but without any real pleasure.  The whole thing was too sordid and soulless, and