My mind, like that of all other children, had been exercised by the
great problem of the mystery of our coming into the world. I was no
longer satisfied with the explanation that children were brought by the
stork, or with that other, advanced with greater seriousness, that they
drifted up in boxes, which were taken up out of Peblinge Lake. As a
child I tormented my mother with questions as to how you could tell whom
every box was for. That the boxes were numbered, did not make things
much clearer. That they were provided with addresses, sounded very
strange. Who had written the addresses? I then had to be content with
the assurance that it was a thing that I was too small to understand; it
should be explained to me when I was older.

My thoughts were not directed towards the other sex. I had no little
girl playfellows, and as I had no sister, knew very few. When I was
eight or nine years old, it is true, there was one rough and altogether
depraved boy whose talk touched upon the sexual question in expressions
that were coarse and in a spirit coarser still. I was scoffed at for not
knowing how animals propagated themselves, and that human beings
propagated themselves like animals.

I replied: "My parents, at any rate, never behaved in any such manner."
Then, with the effrontery of childhood, my schoolfellows went on to the
most shameless revelations, not only about a morbid development of
natural instincts, but actual crimes against nature and against the
elementary laws of society. In other words, I was shown the most
repulsive, most agitating picture of everything touching the relations
of the sexes and the propagation of the species.

It is probable that most boys in a big school have the great mystery of
Nature sullied for them in their tender years by coarseness and