"The private school was clean and wholesome. The plunge into the sexual cocytus of the great public school that followed was effectually sudden. In my day ---- was a perfect stew of uncleanness. There was plenty of incontinence, not much cruelty, no end of dirty conversation, and a great deal of genuine affection, even to heroism, shown among the boys in their relations to one another. All these things were treated by masters and boys alike as more or less unholy, with the result that they were either sought after or flung aside, according to the sexual or emotional instinct of each. No attempt was made at discrimination. A kiss was as unclean as the act of _fellatio_, and no one had any gauge or principle whatever on which to guide the cravings of boyhood. "My first initiation into the mysteries of sex was at the hands of the dormitory servant, who showed me his penis when he woke me in the mornings, and masturbated me when he gave me my hot bath on a Saturday night. This old reprobate of 45 committed the act of _fellatio_ with most of the boys in turn as he went the dormitory rounds. For the older lads I cannot speak, but over us younger ones of 14 and 15 he exercised a sort of unholy terror and fascination. He was very popular; we came to him like doves to a snake. When I revisited my old school many years later he was occupying a very responsible position in the college chapel, and I noticed that he wore that expression of sly reverence which I think I can now instantly detect when I see it in a man. "For the rest the dormitory was boisterous and lewd, and there was a good deal of bullying, which probably did little harm. My principal recollection now is of the filthy mystery of foul talk, that I neither cared for nor understood. What I really needed, like all the other boys, was a little timely help over the sexual problems, but this we none of us got, and each had to work out his own principle of conduct for himself. It was a long, difficult, and wasteful process, and I cannot but believe that many of us failed in the endeavor. We had come unprepared with any advice. The principle upon which we were apparently trained was the repression of every instinct. My mother was ignorant from innocence, my father from indifference, and so between them I was sent out helpless. A mother incurs great responsibility in sending her child away unprepared. A parent should not seek to shift his responsibility upon the schoolmaster. Love alone should be the fount from which revelations should flow; the master, from the very nature of his position, cannot reveal.