at the hands of more than one medical man.  But while at school I was afraid to speak of the trouble which so unnerved and depressed me; and as a consequence my morbid fears grew stronger, being intensified by generalities which I met with from time to time in my reading on the subject of the punishment which nature metes out to impurity.

“On leaving school my sex life continued for some years on the same lines:  a struggle for chastity, morbid fears and regrets about the past, efforts to cope with the neurasthenia, and a haunting dread of coming insanity.  These troubles were increased by my sedentary life.  However I obtained medical aid, and put as good a face on matters as possible.

“But the most trying thing of all has yet to be mentioned—­the discovery that I had not yet got fully clear of the habit of masturbation.  I had, indeed, repudiated it as far as my conscious waking moments were concerned, even though strongly impelled by sexual desire; but one night, about a year after I had relinquished the practice, I found myself again giving way to it in those moments between sleeping and waking when the will is only semiconscious.  It was as if a race took place for wakefulness between my physical instinct, on the one side, and my moral sense and inhibitory nerves on the other; and very frequently the physical instinct won.  This, perhaps, is not an uncommon experience, but it distressed me greatly; and I never felt safe from it until marriage.  I resorted to various expedients to combat this tendency, at length having to tie myself in a certain position every night with a cord round my legs, so as to render it impossible to turn over upon my face.

“In my early manhood the strain on my constitution was considerable from causes other than the sexual neurasthenia, which, indeed, I am now well aware I exaggerated in importance.  Medical advisers whom I consulted in that period assured me that this was so; and, though at the time I often thought that they were concealing the real facts from me out of kindness, my own reading has since convinced me that they spoke nothing but scientific truth.

“The years went on.  I went through a university course, and in spite of my poor health took a good degree.  The agony of my struggle for chastity seemed to come to a climax about four years later when for a long period, partly owing to overstudy and partly to the sexual strain, I fell into a condition of severe nervous exhaustion, one of the most distressing symptoms of which was insomnia.  The dreaded cloud of insanity seemed to come closer.  I had to use alcohol freely at nights; and might by now have become a drunkard, had I not been casually—­or I must say, Providentially—­directed to the common sense plan of measuring my whisky in a dram glass; so that the alcohol could not steal a march upon me.

“This period was one of acute