other man in the whole world feel like you?  Are you alone in the earth with your morbid desires?  Are you a pariah of pariahs, or is there, perhaps, another soul with similar longings living near you?  How often in summer have I gone to the lakes and streams outside cities to seek boys bathing; but I always came back unsatisfied, whether I found any or not.  And in winter I have been irresistibly impelled to return to the same spots, as if it were sanctified by the boys, but my darlings had vanished and cold winds blew over the icy floods, so that I would return feeling as though I had buried all my happiness.

“It must be borne in mind, therefore, that what I have to say regarding my sexual impulses only refers to fancies and never to their practical realization.  My sensual impulses are not connected with the sexual organs; all my voluptuous ideas are not in the least connected with these parts.  For this reason I have never practiced onanism and immissio membri in anum is as repulsive to me as to a normal man.  Even every imitation of coitus is, for me, without attraction.  In a boy’s body two things specially excite me:  his belly and his nates, the first as containing the digestive tract, the second as holding the opening of the bowels.  Of the vegetable processes of life in the boy none interest me nearly so much as the progress of his digestion and the process of defecation.  It is incredible to what an extent this part of physiology has occupied me from youth.  If as a boy I wanted to read something of a piquantly exciting character I sought in my father’s encyclopaedia for articles like:  Obstruction, Constipation, Haemorrhoids, Faeces, etc.  No function of the body seemed to be so significant as this, and I regarded its disturbances as the most important in the whole mechanism of life.  The description of other disorders I could read in cold blood, but intussusception of the bowels makes me ill even to-day.  I am always extremely pleased to hear that the digestion of the people around me is in good condition.  A man who did not sufficiently watch over his digestion aroused distrust in me, and I imagined that wicked men must be horribly indifferent regarding this weighty matter.  Even more than in ordinary persons was I interested in the digestion of more mysterious beings, like magicians in legends, or men of other nations.  I would willingly have made an anthropological study of my favorite subject, only to my annoyance books nearly always pass over the matter in silence.  In history and fiction I regretted the absence of information concerning the state of my heroes’ digestion when they languished in prison or in some unaccustomed or unhealthy spot.  For this reason I held no book more precious than one which describes how a young man after being shipwrecked lived for a long time in a narrow snow-hut, and it was conscientiously stated that he became aware of digestive disturbances.  No immorality angers me more than the foolish