youthful erections and to answer my sexual queries too fully, and cheerfully volunteered information on brothels.  Yet I doubt whether he had an evil purpose in conversing with me.  I thought I should never dare or want to enter one.  I always conjured up the picture of a row of naked women from whom I could take my pick, and the smell of the women I imagined to be identical with the smell of my big friend A. at boarding-school.  When I was traveling down town on an elevated train one afternoon the brakeman asked me whether I had ever been in a brothel, and told me that disorderly houses abounded in my neighborhood.  “I have had connection with women,” said this red-haired young man, waving his hand in greeting to a woman who nodded at him from a window, “since I was 15 years old.  Not long ago a fine-looking, young woman in black offered to pay all my expenses if I would live with her and connect with her.”

When a girl of perhaps 7, a distant cousin of mine, visited us for a few days, I gratified my lust by placing my hand under her genitals and swinging her to and fro.  She giggled with pleasure.  That summer I began to experience the evil effects of the masturbation which I had practiced daily for a year and a half.  Pimples began to break out on my chin (my complexion up to this time had been white and delicate).  The family ascribed my condition to digestive difficulties.  In playing with the boys and girls I found myself seized with a terrible shyness and a tendency to look down and weep.  I had lost all the courage I had—­it had never been great—­in the presence of a crowd of children.  I was fairly at ease with a single companion.  My self-consciousness was something more painful to me than I can convey in words.  At home I wept in my room and cursed myself for a baby.  I little realized the cause of my nervous collapse.  Yet I had too robust a frame not to be able to sleep and to play hard.  The sympathetic pleasure which I had found in swinging my girl-cousin to and fro I now doubled by letting a 7-year-old boy ride cock-horse on my feet.  I experienced an erection during the process, and I almost induced ejaculation when I tickled the boy with my feet in the region of his genitals.  To see his shrinking, giggling joy gave me an exquisite sexual thrill.  I longed to sleep with the boy, but I was afraid of causing comment.  At the new and large boarding school which I entered in the fall my most lustful dreams and ejaculations were concerned with standing this little boy on the footboard of a bed, taking down his knickerbockers, and performing fellatio on him.  But I dreamed also of natural coitus.  I fell in love with the handsome, 12-year-old son of the aged headmaster.  The boy, O., sat next me at the table, and I never tired of gazing at him.  It gave me a special sense of pleasure to look at him when he wore a certain flowing, scarlet, four-in-hand necktie.  But O. was not attracted to me—­for one thing I was