"I am on both sides distantly of English ancestry, the first colonists of my name having come to New England in 1630. Both my mother's and my father's families have been prolific in soldiers and statesmen; my mother's contributed one president to the United States. So far as I am aware, none of my antecedents have betrayed mental vagaries, except a maternal uncle, who, from overstudy, became for a year insane. "I am a graduate of two universities with degrees in arts and medicine. After a year as physician in a hospital, I relinquished medicine altogether, to follow literature, a predilection since early boyhood. "I awoke to sexual feeling at the age of 7, when, at a small private school, glimpsing bare thighs above the stockings of girl schoolmates, I dimly exulted. This fetishism, as it grew more definite, centered at last upon the thighs and then the whole person of one girl in particular. My first sexually tinged dream was of her--that while she stood near I impinged my penis upon a red-hot anvil and then, in beatific self-immolation, exhibited the charred stump to her wondering, round eyes. This love, however, abated at the coming of a new girl to the school, who, not more beautiful, but more buxom, made stronger appeal to my nascent sexuality. One afternoon, in the loft of her father's stable, she induced me to disrobe, herself setting the example. The erection our mutual handlings produced on me was without conscious impulse; I felt only a childish curiosity on beholding our genital difference. But the episode started extravagant whimsies, one of which persistently obsessed me: with these obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and pleasurable consummation. "In the four ensuing years I repeated the act not seldom with this girl and with others. "When I was 11 my sister and I were taken by our parents to Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various countries. "Abroad my lust was glutted to the full: the amenable girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss hotels, German watering-places, French pensions,--where not? Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes. "Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to. Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.