I longed to kiss and hug him, but I did not dare to do so, for he was haughty and intolerant of my attentions.  I even allowed him to stand with one foot on me and remark in a loud tone:  “I am Conqueror!” I endured no end of petty insults and much ill-treatment from this boy.  I reached the height of my passion on the night that he appeared at our cottage in a tight-fitting suit of pepper-and-salt.  I gloried in his perfect legs and besought my guardian that she would buy me a similar suit of clothes.

For the summer after I was 8 years old I lived in a cottage in a country town.  The servant maid M. was a young girl of 16 who listened eagerly to my accounts of the “secrets” and actions in which the girl E. and I had taken delight a year before.  I think that M. arranged a meeting between a little black-haired girl and me in order that we might take a walk and play sexually with each other.  Just as we were starting on our walk one of my relatives said that I must not leave the yard.

The little girl and I had see-sawed together and I had been interested in her legs as she rose in the air. (When I was 13 years old and see-sawing at a picnic with a stout girl, the motion of the board and the sight of her straddled form filled me with longing to embrace her sexually.) One afternoon M. took me to the house of an acquaintance of hers.  M’s brother was in the room and made a number of unremembered remarks which struck me as being rather “free,” and M. told me later that she and the girl once dressed as ballet dancers and danced before M.’s brother.  I felt that he was lascivious.  I was always remarkably intuitive.

I fell in love with a handsome, stout, black-haired boy who lived on a farm; but he was not a “farmer’s son” in the common sense of the word.  I visited him for two or three days, and we slept with each other, to my boundless joy.  For his freckled girl cousin I did not care the turn of my wrist, although she was a nice enough little thing.  One night when we three lay on a bed in the dark, and neither of us boys had eyes or words for her, she silently left us.  He and I never committed the slightest sexual fault.  I left him with tears at the summer-end, and I often kissed his photograph during the following winter.

In the flat-house where I began to live when I was 8 years old, I once practiced mutual tickling of a very slight character with a boy of my own age.  We sat on chairs placed opposite to each other and we inserted our fingers through the openings in our trousers.  Just as we were beginning to enjoy the titillation we were interrupted by the approach of one of my family who, however, was not quick enough to discover us.  Down cellar I often saw the genitals of the janitor’s little girls—­they were fond of lifting their skirts and they did not wear drawers—­but I had no desire to attempt conjunction.  I once caught an older friend of mine (he was 13)