In passing along a side-street one night I was overtaken by a man who began conversation on the weather.  He asked me if I were not cold, began passing his hand up and down my back; then came a question about caning at school, whether certain parts of me were not sore, leading to an investigating touch.  I put his hand aside shyly, but did not resent the action.  Presently he was for exploring my trousers pockets and I began to think him a pickpocket; repulsed in that direction, he returned, to rubbing my back.  The sensation was pleasant.  I now took him for a pimp who wished to take me to a prostitute, and as at that time I had begun to realize that such pleasures were not to my taste I was glad to find myself at my destination, and said good-bye sharply, leaving him standing full of astonishment at his failure with one who had taken his advances so pleasantly.  I could not bring myself to believe that others had the same feelings as myself.  Later I realized my escape, not without a certain amount of regret, and constructed for my own pleasure a different termination to the incident.

“I was now so possessed by masculine attraction that I became a lover of all the heroes I read of in books.  Some became as vivid to me as those with whom I was living in daily contact.  For a time I became an ardent lover of Napoleon (the incident of his anticipation of the nuptials with his second wife attracting me by its impetuous brutality), of Edward I, and of Julius Caesar.  Charles II I remember by a caressing cruelty with which my imagination gifted him.  Jugurtha was a great acquisition.  Bothwell, Judge Jefferies, and many villains of history and fiction appealed to me by their cruelty.

“I had become an adept in the mental construction necessary for the satisfaction of my desires.  And yet up to that date I had never seen the nude body of a full-grown adult.  I had no knowledge of the extent to which hair in certain instances develops on the torso; indeed, my efforts at characterization centered, for the most part, around the thighs and generative organs.  At this time one of my schoolfellows saw a common workman, known to me by name, bathing in a stream with some companions; all his body was, my informant told me, covered with hair from throat to belly.  In face the man was coarse and repulsive, but I now began to regard him as a lovely monstrosity, and for many nights embraced the vision of him passionately, with face buried in the jungle growth of hair that covered his chest.  I was, for the first time, conscious of deliberately (and successfully) willing not to see his face, which was distasteful to me.  At the same time another schoolfellow told me, concerning a master who bathed with the boys, that hair showed above his bathing-drawers as high as the navel.  I now began definitely to construct bodies in detail; the suggestion of extensive hairiness maddened me with delight, but remained in my mind strongly associated with cruelty; my