allowing in each other's
juices, drowned both wants and senses in voluptuous oblivion.

These details also gave studies of character, and specially of my own
character, and as I now read the narratives in print after the lapse of
so many years they seem to me to be needed to explain myself, even to
myself. It is too late. The manuscript is burnt, that printed in its
stead must be taken as truth or not, as scepticism or faith prevails in
the reader, if ever there be one but myself.

Nor can I less abbreviate even now and in the future I fear, for the
full narrative would entail too much expense in printing, and prolong
the time of completion. Yet what pleasure I had in the wordy veracities
as I wrote them, childish, fantastic, ludicrous, as some of the doings
and sayings now seem! How unlike the doings of the couples in erotic
books which I since have read, books written with no other object but to
stimulate the passions,--no object that of mine in writing this.

The narratives were written in the present tense, but in print have been
altered to the past, which gives them an air of a studied composition,
written as a man might write a novel; but the writing extended over well
nigh forty years, and barely a word has been altered, excepting those
due to omissions.

There are however a few remarks added here and there to explain the
circumstances and connect the incidents; these are needful to explain
lapses of time, and to show the continuity of the history, for all the
amours were written separately; yet often I had two or three women in
hand at the same period. So in arranging them chronologically a few
additions and observations were needful to explain, and these are of
them.

One muddy night in the Strand there was an exceedingly well-dressed and
very short-petticoated (they all wore them then) girl of about seventeen
years of age; her legs especially pleased me, they were so plump and
neat, and her feet so well shod. After my offer had been accepted,
we went to a house in a court just by Drury-Lane Theatre, and to a
top-floor front-room very handsomely furnished. She lived there, and
was a dress-lodger as I found afterwards. She was beautifully clean,
had fine linen, and was no sham in any way; a fresh, strong, plump,
well-made young girl with lovely firm breasts, and a small quantity of
brown hair on her cunt. Cunt and breasts looked only seventeen years,
backside, thighs, arms, calves looked twenty. She strip