deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed were all beautiful—­beauty was their chief asset.  Dorian, further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms.  Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness, into his loving embrace.

“My first venture upon fellatio was a month later, with the young surgeon.  I confessed the whim to try it, and he acceded.  Though this nauseous and fatiguing act, very imperfectly performed, was prompted mostly by curiosity, there arose soon a passional hankering for repetition.  In short, appetence for fellatio grew slowly from the night of that mawkish fiasco and waxed eventually into a sovereign want.

“Perhaps miscarriage of that initiatory experiment was due to precipitance, incubation of my perverse instinct being not yet complete.  A hiatus of a month now supervened, in which, while further fellatio was not attempted, my mind came always nearer to a reconcilement with the grossness of the act, and began to discover for its creatures some correlation in pretty boys beheld in the flesh.  One evening, in Broadway, I conceived suddenly a full-fledged desire for a youth issuing from an hotel as I passed.  Our glances met and dwelled together.  At a shop-window he first accosted me.  He was an invert.  With him, in his room at the hotel whence I had seen him emerge, I passed an apocalyptic night.  Thereafter commerce with boys only in the spirit ceased to be an end; the images were carnalized, stepped from their framework into the streets.  That boy, that god out of the machine, I see him clearly:  his brown, curling hair; his eyes blue as the sea; his chest both arched and so plump, his rounded arms, his taper waist, the graceful swell of his hips and full, snowy thighs; I recall as of yesterday the dimples in his knees, the slenderness of his ankles, the softness of his little feet, with insteps pink like the inside of a shell.  How I gloated over his ample roundness, his rich undulations!

“In the last eight years I have performed fellatio (never pedicatio) with more than three hundred men and boys.  My preference is for boys between 15 and 20, refined, pretty, girlish, and themselves homosexual.

“Personally, barring this love for males, I am in all ways masculine, given to outdoor sports, and to smoking and drinking moderately.  In appearance I am but a boy of 18.  My face and figure are generally considered beautiful:  I am clean-shaved, with black, curling hair, red cheeks and brown eyes; features delicate and regular; body, of medium height, everywhere practically hairless.  By years of training I have attained