never been warned of the treacherous nature of the ground.  Before or soon after I was 7 years old, the example of an elder brother, who had lately begun to go to school as a day-boy, initiated me into the mysteries of masturbation, which seemed to me then as harmless as it was fascinating; and the novel pleasure was almost daily indulged in, after I had acquired sufficient dexterity to accomplish the act within a reasonable time, without a twinge of conscience, either in that brother’s company or when alone.  Decency demanded secrecy in the gratification of what soon became an imperious desire, and the preliminary operations included, almost from the first, mutual fellatio and approximation of the excited organs; but similar privacy was very properly sought during the performance of other bodily acts associated with those ’less honorable members,’ and it appeared to me quite as natural and right for us to amuse ourselves together in that way as for a married couple to hide their most intimate embraces from the observation of others.  Indeed, I went farther than that, and even came to regard the absence of all shame between us as akin to the primeval innocence which Adam and Eve exhibited before the Fall.  I believed for long that we two were specially privileged and possessed a peculiar sense denied to other boys, for I had never heard of masturbation till I learnt, not the word indeed, but the thing itself.

“My curiosity about the real nature of sexual union in the case of human beings set my intelligence to work at the interesting problem, and by carefully studying certain parts of the Bible, Lempriere’s classical and other dictionaries, as well as by persistently watching when I could the amorous proceedings of domestic animals, I learnt enough to make its most prominent features pretty clear before I was 11 years of age.  I was then all eagerness to have the opportunity of inspecting at close quarters the genitals of women or young girls, and a stay at the seaside when I was 12 made the latter at least feasible.  When the shore was nearly deserted, between 1 and 2 P.M., the daughters of the fisherfolk used to besiege the bathing machines and disport themselves in the water, bathing and paddling in various stages of nudity.  I would pretend that my whole attention was being given to the making of miniature tunnels in the sand, while all the time I slyly peeped at what I most desired to see, whether in front or from behind, as the dancing damsels stood upright or stooped till their haunches were higher than their heads.  I had already read something somewhere about the clitoris, and wanted especially to see it, but indistinct glimpses were all that I could obtain; nor was it until I visited an anatomical museum, which then existed at the top of the Haymarket in London, that I learned, a good many years later, from several life-sized models there displayed, the characteristic features of that part, as well