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 within in 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. —18—