his bedclothes, for the male sex repels me powerfully in personal contact; he began to talk of masturbation, and now I can understand what he was aiming at.  But my day-dreams of nymphs and dryads kept me in a state of perpetual tension, and erection was very frequent.  The early morbid admiration of delicate women became replaced by admiration of health and strength combined with grace.

“Age 17-18.  I was given a cubicle in which my neighbor on the right masturbated noisily two or three times a week, and the one on the left every night, using intermittent friction to drag it out longer.  One night, kneeling at my bedside, saying prayers, my attention was divided between these and the occupation of my neighbor, when, after not having masturbated for four years,—­the critical years of development,—­the hand flew to the phallus and

“’pulses pounding through palms and trembling
encircling fingers’

“procured, in Walt Whitman’s language,

“‘the wholesome relief,—­repose, content.’

“I slept well and had a sense of elation at the proof of manhood, for we boys were anxious about whether we secreted semen or not.  The sexual obsession was tempered, and about three weeks later I had my first ’pollution’—­the ‘angel of the night,’ as Mantegazza with better sense calls it.  From that time on I had pollutions every two or three weeks, with dreams sometimes of masturbation or of nymphs, or quite irrelevant matters.  For a time these gave me perfect relief; then my ‘dilectatio morosa’ began to grow again, and the phallus would become so sensitive that working about on the belly would liberate the orgasm.

“Age 18-19.  I had kept on persuading myself I was not masturbating—­avoiding the use of the hand—­but now I dropped this pretense, and frankly conceded the need to myself.  I got done with it in a peremptory way and thought no more of it.  I had no evil effects, moral or physical, and my mother would often compliment me on my bright appearance the morning after.  At that time the appetite matured every seven to ten days, and, though I dreaded the idea of slavery to it, it would have been very hard to forego it.  Headaches, which had begun to plague me from puberty on, grew rarer.  Pollutions occurred in between, but were less effectual.  I had up to this point accepted the incidental pleasure under a sort of protest; but now I got over that too and I allowed what I would prefer to call an idio-erotism (rather than an auto-erotism) its way, always picturing beautiful nymphs to myself.  Surroundings of natural beauty moved me to this kind of reverie, partly perhaps because I had once secretly observed a lad basking naked on the sandy beach and toying with himself.  The recollection is wholly unsullied to me.  Happening on one occasion to check the stimulation about two-thirds way to orgasm, I experienced a miniature orgasm like the childish