In a few cases, I have for what even seems to me very strange, suggested
reasons, or causes, but only where the facts seem by themselves to be
very improbable, but have not exaggerated anything willingly. When I
have named the number of times I have fucked a woman in my youth, I may
occasionally be in error, it is difficult to be quite accurate on such
points after a lapse of time. But as before said in many cases the
incidents were written down a few weeks and often within a few
days after they occurred. I do not attempt to pose as a Hercules in
copulation, there are quite sufficient braggarts on that head, much
intercourse with gay women, and doctors, makes me doubt the wonderful
feats in coition, some men tell of.

I have one fear about publicity, it is that of having done a few things
by curiosity and impulse (temporary abberations), which even professed
libertines may cry fie on. There are plenty who will cry fie who have
done all and worse than I have and habitually, but crying out at the
sins of others was always a way of hiding one's own iniquity. Yet from
that cause perhaps no mortal eye but mine, will see this history. The
christian name of the servants mentioned are generally the true ones,
the other names mostly false, the phonetically resembling the true
ones. Initials nearly always the true ones. In most cases the woman they
represent are dead or lost to me. Streets and baudy houses named are
nearly always correct. Most of the houses named are now closed or pulled
down; but any middle aged man about town would recognize them. Where a
road, house, room, or garden is described, the description is exactly
true; even to the situation of a tree, chair, bed, sofa, pisspot. The
district is sometimes given wrongly; but it matters little whether
Brompton be substituted for Hackney, or Camden Town for Walworth. Where
however owing to the incidents it is needful, the places of amusement
are given correctly. The Tower, and Argyle rooms, for example. All this
is done to prevent giving pain to some, perhaps still living, for I have
no malice to gratify.

I have mystified family affairs, but if I say I had ten cousins, when I
had but six, or that one aunt's house was in Surrey instead of Kent, or
in Lancashire; it breaks the clue and cannot matter to the reader.

But my doings with man and woman are as true as gospel. If I say that
I saw, or did, that with a cousin male, or female, it was with a cousin
and no mere ac