As he spoke I suddenly seized him by the legs and toppled him over, fastening on him like a bulldog the instant he was down. From the first it was clear that I was wholly outmatched, and had no chance. I had him on his back, one knee on his chest, and my hands at his throat; but he put up his two hands very much in the same indifferent way in which he would have gone to work to fasten--or to unfasten--a collar-stud, and taking my two wrists, one in each of his fists, he forced them apart, and away from his neck, as easily as a clamp or a vice opens or shuts by the twisting of the screw. As if to show his strength, he held my two hands powerless, thus, for a few seconds, and then with a contemptuous laugh he swung me away from him and aside, as easily as a man, who is teaching a child to jump, swings the little one from a chair to the floor. What followed I have never ceased to regret. The man had had it in his power, then and there, to strangle me as I lay. With an antagonist whose arms were, as I have said, as long and as strong as a gorilla's, and whose hands held one in a grip of iron, it was useless--athletic and muscular as I am--to struggle. I was as a child in his grasp; and, remembering that he had--whether from a contempt which was more cruel than a blow, or from some instinct of chivalry which made him disdainful of so puny an opponent--set me free of his own accord, and, in a sense, thrown my liberty in my face, remembering all this, I am ashamed to record what followed. The only point to be urged in my excuse is that I was beside myself with wounded vanity and by the humiliation which had been put upon me--I was about to have written by the humiliation of my defeat; but defeat comes after a contest, and between him and me there had been, thus far, as little appearance of contest as there is when a strapping nursemaid takes a naughty child across her knees, and, in spite of the culprit's tears and kicks, administers the necessary number of smacks. Whether what I have urged, in extenuation of what I did, will be accounted any excuse by the reader, I cannot say; but the fact remains that, mad with impotent anger, and burning for some sort of revenge, I rose to my feet and struck him, unprepared as he was, full in the face, and with all my might. With a snarl like that of a wild beast he closed with me, and for a few seconds--for my fury seemed temporarily to endow me with a giant's strength--we rolled over and over, each striving to pin the other to the ground.