A case of passionate attachment between two Indian boys was told to the author of the present book by a master at a school in India. The boys--who were about sixteen years of age--were both at the same school, and were devoted friends; but the day came when they had to part. One was taken away by his parents to go to a distant part of the country. The other was inconsolable at the prospect. When the day arrived, and his companion was removed, he soon after went quietly to a well in the school precincts, jumped in, and was drowned. The news, sent on by wire, reached the departing friend while still on his journey. He said little, but at one of the stations left the train and disappeared. The train went on, but at a little distance out, the boy ran out of the bushes by the line, threw himself on the rails, and was killed. The following is taken from one of the “cases” recorded by Havelock Ellis in his “Sexual Inversion”; “The earliest sex-impression that I am conscious of is at the age of nine or ten falling in love with a handsome boy who must have been about two years my senior. I do not recollect ever having spoken to him, but my desire, as far as I can recall, was that he should seize hold of and handle me. I have a distinct impression yet of how pleasurable even physical pain or cruelty would have been at his hands.”--HAVELOCK ELLIS, _op. cit._, “case” xiii., p. 71. “When I was about sixteen-and-a-half years old, there came into the house a boy about two years younger than myself, who became the absorbing thought of my school-days. I do not remember a moment, from the time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat reservedly. He was always a little ahead of me in books and scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl who is being wooed, a little mockingly perhaps, but with real pleasure. He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things of which all the school obscenely talked.”--_Same case_, p. 73.