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MY SECRET LIFE have passed away from my mind for a time, but I told my cousin Fred about it afterwards. He thought I must have been dreaming, and I began to wonder if it really had occurred, I never thought much about it until I began to recall my childhood for this history.

I must have been twelve years old, when I went to an uncle’s in Surrey, and became a close friend of my cousin Fred, a very devil from his cradle, and of whom much more will be told: before then I had only seen him at intervals. We were then allowed, and it seems to me not before that time, to go out by ourselves. We talked boyish baudiness. “Ain’t you green,” said he, a girl’s hole isn’t called a cock, it’s a cunt, they fuck with it,” and then he told me all he knew. I don’t think I had heard that before, but can’t be sure.

From that time a new train of ideas came into my head. I had a vague idea, though not a belief, that a cock and cunt, were not made for pissing only. Fred treated me as a simpleton in these matters, and was always calling me an ass; I have quite a painful recollection of my inferiority to him, in such things, and of begging him to instruct me. “They make children that way,” said Fred. “You come up and we will ask the old nurse, where children come from, and she’ll say ‘out of the parsley-bed,’ but it’s all a lie.” We went and asked her in a casual sort of way. She replied, “the parsley-bed,” and laughed. The nurse at my house told me the same, when I asked afterwards about my mother’s last baby. “Ain’t they liars?” Fred remarked to me, “it comes out of their cunts, and it’s made by fucking.”

We both desired to see women piddling, though both must have before seen them at it often enough. —36—