sumed his assailant's face to be.

Sam was not unprepared for this display. His researches in the art of
life-saving had taught him that your drowning man frequently struggles
against his best interests. In which case, cruel to be kind, one simply
stunned the blighter. He decided to stun Mr. Swenson, though, if he had
known that gentleman more intimately and had been aware that he had the
reputation of possessing the thickest head on the water-front, he would
have realised the magnitude of the task. Friends of Mr. Swenson, in
convivial moments, had frequently endeavoured to stun him with bottles,
boots and bits of lead piping and had gone away depressed by failure.
Sam, ignorant of this, attempted to do the job with clenched fist, which
he brought down as smartly as possible on the crown of the other's
bowler hat.

It was the worst thing he could have done. Mr. Swenson thought highly of
his hat and this brutal attack upon it confirmed his gloomiest
apprehensions. Now thoroughly convinced that the only thing to do was to
sell his life dearly, he wrenched himself round, seized his assailant by
the neck, twined his arms about his middle, and accompanied him below
the surface.

By the time he had swallowed his first pint and was beginning his
second, Sam was reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that
this was the end. The thought irritated him unspeakably. This, he felt,
was just the silly, contrary way things always happened. Why should it
be he who was perishing like this? Why not Eustace Hignett? Now there
was a fellow whom this sort of thing would just have suited.
Broken-hearted Eustace Hignett would have looked on all this as a
merciful release.

He paused in his reflections to try to disentangle the more prominent of
Mr. Swenson's limbs from about him. By this time he was sure that he had
never met anyone he disliked so intensely as Mr. Swenson--not even his
Aunt Adeline. The man was a human octopus. Sam could count seven
distinct legs twined round him and at least as many arms. It seemed to
him that he was being done to death in his prime by a solid platoon of
Swedes. He put his whole soul into one last effort ... something seemed
to give ... he was free. Pausing only to try to kick Mr. Swenson in the
face, Sam shot to the surface. Something hard and sharp prodded him in
the head. Then something caught the collar of his coat; and, finally,
spouting like a whale, he found himself dragged upwards and ove