Toward the end of this period there was a new and increasing development of another sort, not recognized then as at all sexual in character.  He began to feel toward certain boys in a way very different and much keener than he had done thus far toward girls, although at the time he made no comparisons.  For instance there was a boy whom he considered very pretty.  They visited each other often and spent long times playing together.  In school they looked and looked at each other until delicious, uncontrollable giggling spells came on.  Sexual matters were never discussed or thought of.  These experiences were, in their way, very sentimental and ideal.  M.O. is sure that with himself the main consideration was always the other boy’s beauty.  He began to recall with great fondness a certain much older and very handsome youth who had lived near him in the first neighborhood, and had at the time shown him, various little friendly attentions.  He seldom saw him now, and hardly sought to do so, yet was immensely pleased by a casual word or look from him in the schoolyard, and much interested when other people spoke of him.

    A cousin about two years younger than M.O. often visited him and
    slept with him.  They were very fond of each other, and handled
    each other’s organs.

When M.O. was about 11 years of age the family removed to a distant neighborhood, where there were almost no children of his own age, and where any association with those in the one just left was practically impossible.  From this time until the changes of puberty were well under way his sexual life contrasted strongly, in its solitude, with the former promiscuity.  He remembers liking to wrestle with two or three schoolboys and to get their heads between his legs.  He thinks they were not aware of his sexual impulses.  He flirted, consciously flirted, with certain school-girls, but never even suggested anything sexual to them.  He read a few family medical books.

One day, lying on an old uneven couch, innocently enough at first, he induced a new and delicious sensation, altogether different from any he had ever dreamed of—­something far beyond the satisfaction of mere curiosity.  He repeated the thing and before long produced emissions.  Masturbation soon followed.  Certain days he would perform the act two or three times, but again he would avoid it for days.  He began at once to fight the tendency, and felt very guilty and very ashamed for indulging it.  He prayed for help and at times wept over his failures to break the habit so quickly formed.  For a certain period, after two or three years, he seemed to have succeeded, but he observed that he had intense erotic dreams with copious emissions regularly every eight days.  Just then certain newspaper advertisements fell under his eye, and these persuaded him that he had produced in himself a diseased condition.