which I lived, my nervous system was a good deal shattered and exhausted.  Mentally and morally my nature is pretty well balanced, and I have never had any serious perturbations in these departments.

“At the age of 8 or 9, and long before distinct sexual feelings declared themselves, I felt a friendly attraction toward my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love, which, however, never found any expression for itself till I was fully 20 years of age.  I was a day-boarder at school and heard little of school-talk on sex subjects, was very reserved and modest besides; no elder person or parent ever spoke to me on such matters; and the passion for my own sex developed gradually, utterly uninfluenced from the outside.  I never even, during all this period, and till a good deal later, learned the practice of masturbation.  My own sexual nature was a mystery to me.  I found myself cut off from the understanding of others, felt myself an outcast, and, with a highly loving and clinging temperament, was intensely miserable.  I thought about my male friends—­sometimes boys of my own age, sometimes elder boys, and once even a master—­during the day and dreamed about them at night, but was too convinced that I was a hopeless monstrosity ever to make any effectual advances.  Later on it was much the same, but gradually, though slowly, I came to find that there were others like myself.  I made a few special friends, and at last it came to me occasionally to sleep with them and to satisfy my imperious need by mutual embraces and emissions.  Before this happened, however, I was once or twice on the brink of despair and madness with repressed passion and torment.

“Meanwhile, from the first, my feeling, physically, toward the female sex was one of indifference, and later on, with the more special development of sex desires, one of positive repulsion.  Though having several female friends, whose society I like and to whom I am sincerely attached, the thought of marriage or cohabitation with any such has always been odious to me.

“As a boy I was attracted in general by boys rather older than myself; after leaving school I still fell in love, in a romantic vein, with comrades of my own standing.  Now,—­at the age of 37,—­my ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, of my own age or rather younger—­preferably of the working class.  Though having solid sense and character, he need not be specially intellectual.  If endowed in the latter way, he must not be too glib or refined.  Anything effeminate in a man, or anything of the cheap intellectual style, repels me very decisively.

“I have never had to do with actual pederasty, so called.  My chief desire in love is bodily nearness or contact, as to sleep naked with a naked friend; the specially sexual, though urgent enough, seems a secondary matter.  Pederasty, either active or passive, might seem in place