"The first explosions of combustible constitution" in Rousseau's, precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." He only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he was passionately devoted to a Mlle. Vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach. He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mlle. Goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis pervades much of his life. Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child"[54] was written when the author was forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring the author down to the age of fourteen and a half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting of pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the post-office after long misgivings and delays. He had a superficial and a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridiculous, shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would have let himself be cut into bits. He believes his transition period lasted longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was carried from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and absurd manners, and touched moat of the perilous rocks on the voyage of life. He had an early love for an older girl whose name he wrote in cipher on his books, although he felt it a little artificial, but believed it might