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 usually cut short allusion to them by saying, it is not a subject to talk about, lets talk of some thing else: My cousin told her husband, and when we were together he told me, and his own experiences, and then all the circumstances, came into my mind, just as I have told here.

I could not, as the reader will hear, thoroughly uncover my prick tip without pain till I was sixteen years old, nor well then when quite stiff unless it went up a cunt. My nursemaid I expect thought this curious, and tried to remedy the error in my make, and hurt me. My mother, by her extremely delicate feeling, shut herself off from much knowledge of the world, which was the reason why she had such implicit belief in my virtue, until I had seen twenty-two years, and kept, or nearly so, a French harlot. I imagine I must have slept with this nursemaid, and certainly I did with some female, in a room called the Chinese room, on account of the color of the wall papers. I recollect a female being there in bed with me, that I awoke one morning feeling very hot and stifled, and that my head was against flesh; that flesh was all about me, my mouth and nose being embedded in hair, or some thing scrubby, which had a hot peculiar odour. I have a recollection of a pair of hands suddenly clutching and dragging me up on to the pillow, and of daylight then. I have no recollection of a word being uttered. This incident I could not long have forgotten, having told my cousin heard of it before my father did. He used to say it was the governess.

I suppose I must have slipped down in my sleep, till my head laid against her belly and cunt: Some years afterwards, when I got the smell of another woman's cunt on my fingers, it at once reminded me of the smell I had under my nose in the bed; and I knew at a flash that I had smelt cunt before and recollected where, but no more.