question. Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it
were, in two separate air-tight compartments,--my friendships in
one, my sex instincts in another,--to be kept under and repressed
by the public-school code as I conceived it.

"It is needless to say that I was continually troubled by the
customary sex phenomena: erotic dreams, loss of semen,
troublesome erections at night, etc. These I repressed as best I
could, by habitual masturbation and by the regular diet and
exercise which academic life made possible. At one time, for the
period of a year I should say, I tried to overcome the desire for
masturbation by gradual stages, on the principle of the
drunkard's cure by which he took every day less tipple by the
insertion of one pebble more in his bottle. I marked on my
calendar the erotic dreams and the nights on which I masturbated,
and sought gradually to extend the intervening periods. Six
weeks, however, was the longest time for which I was able to
abstain."

A few years later the writer of this communication formed an
intimate relationship (in which he did not make the first
advances) with a youth, some years younger than himself and of
lower social class, whose development he was able to assist. "But
for my part," he remarks, "I owe him as much as I gave him, for
his love lighted up the gold of affection that was in me and
consumed the dross. It was from him that I first learned that
there was no such thing as a hard-and-fast line between the
physical and the spiritual in friendship." This relationship
lasted for some years, when the young man married; its effects
are described as very beneficial to both parties; all the sexual
troubles vanished, together with the desire to masturbate.
"Everything in life began to sing with joy, and what little of
real creative work I may have done I attribute largely to the
power of work that was born in me during those years."

HISTORY XIV.--Scotchman, aged 38. His paternal ancestors were
normal, so far as he knows. His mother belonged to a very
eccentric old Celtic family. Soon after 5 he became so enamored
of a young shepherd that the boy had to be sent away. He
practised masturbation many years before the age of puberty, and
attaches importance to this as a factor in the evolution of his
homosexual life.