r, and in doing so, my hand, or foot went through a drum, I had been
drumming on, at which I cried.

As I sat crying on the floor besides her, I recollect her naked legs,
and one of her hands shaking violently beneath her petticoats, and of my
having some vague notion that the woman was ill, I felt timid. All was
for a moment quiet, her hand ceased, still she lay on her back, and I
saw her thighs, then turning round she drew me to her, kissed me and
tranquillised me. As she turned round I saw one side of her backside, I
leant over it and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum, the
evening sunbeams made it all bright, it had at some time been raining I
recollect.

I expect I must have seen her cunt, as I sat beside her naked thigh.
Looking towards her and crying about my broken drum, and when I saw
her hand moving no doubt she was frigging. Yet I have not the slightest
recollection of her cunt, nor of anything more than I have told. But of
having seen her naked thighs, I am certain, I seem often to have seen
them, but cannot feel certain of that.

The oddest thing is, that whilst I early recollected more or less
clearly what took place two or three years later on, and ever
afterwards, on sexual matters; and what I said, heard, and did, and
nearly consecutively, this my first recollection of cock, and cunt,
escaped my memory for full twenty years.

Then one day talking with the husband of one of my cousins, about
infantine incidents he told me something which had occurred to him in
his childhood; and suddenly, almost as quickly as a magic lantern throws
a picture on to a wall, this which had occurred to me came into my mind.
I have since thought over it a hundred times, but cannot recollect one
circumstance relating to the adventure more than I have told.

My mother had been giving advice to my cousin about nursemaids. They
were not to be trusted. "When Walter was a little fellow, she had
dismissed a filthy creature, whom she had detected in abominable
practices with one of her children," what they were my mother never
disclosed. She hated indelicacies of any sort, and usually cut short
allusion to them by saying, "It's not a subject to talk about, let's
talk of something else." My cousin told her husband, and when we
were together he told me, and his own experiences, and then all the
circumstances came into my mind, just as I have told here.

I could not, as the reader will hear, thoroughly uncover my pric