This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

MY SECRET LIFE

room, she said to the females in bed, they were not to hurry up, she had only fetched Wattie.

But all this only came vividly to my mind when, a few years after, I began to talk about women with my cousin, and we told each other all we had seen, and heard, about females.

Until I was about twelve years old I never went to school, there was a governess in the house who instructed me, and the other children, my father was nearly always at home. I was carefully kept from the grooms and other men servants; once I recollect getting to the stable yard and seeing a stallion mount a mare, his prick go right out of sight in what appeared to me to be the mares bottom, of father appearing and calling out “What does that boy do there,” and my being hustled away. I had scarcely a boy acquaintance excepting among my cousins, and therefore did not learn as much about sexual matters, as boys early do at schools. I did not know what the stallion was doing. I could have had no notion of it then, nor did I think about it.

The next thing I clearly recollected, was one of my male cousins stopping with us, we walked out and when piddling together against a hedge, his saying: “show me your cock, Walter, and I will show you mine.” We stood and examined each others cocks, and for the first time, I became conscious, that I could not get my foreskin easily back, like other boys. I pulled his backwards and forwards. He hurt me, laughed and sneered at me, another boy came and I think another, we all compared cocks, and mine was the only one which would not unskin, they jeered me, I burst into tears, and went away, thinking there was

—30—