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MY SECRET LIFE 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 consequitively [sic], 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 usualy cut short allusion to them by saying, “It’s not a subject to talk about, let’s talk of —25—