"_Age 18-19_. I had kept on persuading myself I was not masturbating--avoiding the use of the hand--but now I dropped this pretense, and frankly conceded the need to myself. I got done with it in a peremptory way and thought no more of it. I had no evil effects, moral or physical, and my mother would often compliment me on my bright appearance the morning after. At that time the appetite matured every seven to ten days, and, though I dreaded the idea of slavery to it, it would have been very hard to forego it. Headaches, which had begun to plague me from puberty on, grew rarer. Pollutions occurred in between, but were less effectual. I had up to this point accepted the incidental pleasure under a sort of protest; but now I got over that too and I allowed what I would prefer to call an idio-erotism (rather than an auto-erotism) its way, always picturing beautiful nymphs to myself. Surroundings of natural beauty moved me to this kind of reverie, partly perhaps because I had once secretly observed a lad basking naked on the sandy beach and toying with himself. The recollection is wholly unsullied to me. Happening on one occasion to check the stimulation about two-thirds way to orgasm, I experienced a miniature orgasm like the childish one, but with no declension of the tumescence, and I was able to repeat this maneuver several times before the full orgasm. This I later practised in _Coitus prolongatus_--giving the partner time to come up. I had already got into the way of poising the feeling on its climax. The ejaculator reflex, being habituated to this, seems to set in with its throbs when the maneuver is simulated, though no semen has yet been poured into the bulbous portion for the ejaculators to act upon. If this play be broken off before the critical spasm--as in the American 'Karezza,' etc.--there is no perceptible reaction, though an unsatisfied feeling remains. But when the act proceeds to emission and the poignant _undercurrent_ of feeling sets in that ushers the ejaculation and may only last two to five seconds, it makes all the difference, and constitutional signs appear--perspiration, etc. This leads to the question whether the critical sensation specially involves the sympathetic nervous system? Up to that point the process is under control, but then automatic.