in their company after my ninth year; yet I thought well enough of their looks and ways to enjoy their company at dances.  The girls liked me in a platonic way, for I was accounted a good, big, kind, blundering boy with a helping hand for the smallest fry.

During the summer after I was 13, I imagined myself in the early morning, when I was half awake, as persuading my wife to have coitus with me.  In the course of my spoken words I kept my hand under my scrotum.

A plump girl-cousin of my own age was visiting at my uncle’s during the summer after I was 13.  With her I greatly desired to satisfy myself, but I could not be sure that my boy cousin (5 years old) might not find us out, even though she should consent.  Once when we three were in the hay-loft a wave of lust rolled over me, but I made no proposal.  Night and gaslight greatly increased my libido.  On one occasion my aunt had gone to the village for ice-cream, and L. and I were left alone in the dining-room.  I took her on my lap and had a powerful erection.  I almost asked her to play sexually with me in the barn, but instead I spoke of an imaginary girl, the first letters of whose successive names spelled an indecent word for coitus—­a word known to almost every Anglo-Saxon child, I fear.  L. laughed, but gave no sign of assent.  For a neighboring girl of 15 I felt such a drawing that early in the morning I would roll on the floor with my erect organ in my hand in riotous imagining of coitus with her.  I walked with her in the woods and sat at her feet, but although I felt instinctively that she would satisfy me without much persuasion, yet I could not ask her.  One night I started to church in order to walk home with her, and lead her (if possible) to a field where we might gratify ourselves (I picked out the exact grassy spot where we might lie); but when I was almost at the church door my “moral sense” (if that is what it was) rose and dragged me home again.

During the swimming hour I watched the genitals of the boys, comparing them carefully in the most minute details.  Circumcised organs affected me as being disagreeable, and men’s hairy, coarse genitals I abhorred.

When 13 I became acquainted with the new mail-boy at the inn.  He was a city “street-boy,” and got me into smoking cigarettes occasionally.  I did not definitely take up smoking until I was 16.  He told me that a mason once offered him ten cents if he would masturbate the man in a cellar.  The boy said that he refused.  I slept a few times with an ill-favored boy of fine parentage.  He was of my own age, and I had played with him in a natural way for several years, but my increasing sexual desires led me to mutually masturbate with him, and even unsuccessfully to attempt with him mutual paedicatio.  On the morning after our nights of sensuality I felt “gone” and miserable, but not repentant.  By afternoon I was myself