of a real longing to associate with people on terms of intimacy.  As a child I was sensitive and solitary; later I became morbid as well.  In a character so constituted the feelings and impulses of the moment are likely to rule, and such has been my constant experience, though a large element of obstinacy in my character has kept me from appearing impulsive, and slight influences will bring about reactions which seem out of all proportion to their cause.  For instance, I cannot, even now, read the more erotic of Boccaccio’s stories without a good deal of sexual excitement and restlessness, which can be relieved only by vigorous exercise or masturbation.

    The first ten years of my life were passed on a farm, most of the
    time without playmates or companions of my own age.

As far back as I can remember I indulged in elaborate day-dreams in which I figured as the chief character along with a few others who were chiefly creatures of my imagination, but at times borrowed from reality.  These others were always boys until I learned the proper function of the sexual organs, when girls usurped the whole stage in numbers beyond the limits of a Turkish harem.  Even at school my day-dreams were scarcely interrupted, for my shyness and timidity made me very unpopular among my schoolmates, who tormented me after the fashion of small boys or neglected me, as the spirit moved them.  To make matters worse, I was brought up under the “sheltered life system,” kept carefully away from the “bad boys,” which category included nearly all the youngsters of the community, and deluged with moral homilies and tirades on things religious until I was thoroughly convinced that goodness and discomfort, the right and the unpleasant, were strictly synonymous; and I was kept through much of the time facing the prospect of an early death, to be followed by the good old orthodox hell or the equal miseries of its gorgeous alternative.  I may say in all seriousness that this is a conservative and unexaggerated account of one phase of my early life—­the one, I think, that tended most strongly to make me introspective and morbid.  Later on, when I was trying to abandon the habit of masturbation, this early training greatly increased the despair I felt at each successive failure.

The first traces of sexual excitement that I can now recall occurred when I was about 4 years old.  I had erections quite frequently and found a mild pleasure in fondling my genitals when these occurred, especially just after waking in the morning.  I had no notion of an orgasm, and never succeeded in producing one until I was 13 years of age.  In the summer of my sixth year I experienced pleasurable sensations in daubing my genitals with oil and then fondling or rubbing them, but I abandoned this amusement after getting some irritating substance into the meatus.  A year later my mother warned me that playing with my penis would “make me very sick,”