The following summer I lived in the woods.  My next-door playmate was a little girl of my own age—­6 years.  She sat down before me in the barn and exposed her genitals.  This was the first time I had seen female organs, or had thought for a moment that they differed from my own.  In great perplexity I asked the little girl:  “Has it been cut off?” She and I defecated in peach baskets that we found in the upper part of the barn.

When I was 7 years old and back in the Eastern city I lived in the house of a physician.  Alone with his 3-year-old daughter one day, I showed her my erect organ, and felt a delicious gratification when she stroked it with the words:  “Nice!  Nice!” I confessed my fault to my guardian that night after I had said my prayers.  I had complained to my mother a year before of the inconvenience I found in my penis being “so long sometimes.”  She said that she would “see about having the end taken off.”  But I was never circumcised.  Her words gave me the doubly unpleasant impression that my glans was to be cut off.

There came occasionally to the kitchen of Dr. W.’s house a foul-mouthed Irish laundress who used coarse language to me concerning urination.  I loathed the woman, and yet one night I dreamed that I was embracing her naked form and rolling over and over with her on the bed; and in spite of my sight of female genitals a few months before, I thought of her as having organs of my own kind and size.  At my first school I watched a red-haired boy of 12 expose the penis of a 7-year-old boy as he lay on his back in the bath-room.  I do not remember that the sight gave me sexual pleasure.

I spent the summer before I was 8 in a double house.  The adopted daughter of our neighbor (a neurotic, retired physician) was a girl of 13 who had been taken from a poor laboring family.  She got me to show her my parts, touched them, and asked whether I urinated from my scrotum.  She also induced me to play with her genitals as we sat on a sofa in the twilight, and to spank her naked nates with the back of a hair-brush as she lay on a bed; but from none of these performances did I derive physical satisfaction.  The girl E. and I took delight in “talking dirty secrets,” as she expressed it.  Her young cousin H. (nephew of her adopted mother) never heard me use the word “thing” without suggestively smiling.  E. recalled the pleasant hours that she had spent with her cousin when they were in their night-gowns.  She did not particularize these sexual relations.  Under the board-walk the boy H. and I once defecated in bottles.  Some little girls who lived opposite us pulled up their dresses one night and “dared” each other to dance out beyond the end of the house, in full view of the road.  We boys merely looked on.

I now fell passionately in love with a remarkably handsome little boy of my own age.