My swimming kit had meanwhile been taken down into the stokehole, so that when it was handed to me it was not only nearly dry but, what was very much more to the purpose, comfortably warm. Donning it and a fine warm boat cloak, I accompanied the skipper to the deck and walked aft to take a look at the task before me. I found that they had taken the boat in to the very edge of the outer line of the surf, which stretched away inshore of us, line after line, in an apparently interminable procession of breakers, like lines of infantry rushing forward to the assault, vaguely visible in their pallid phosphorescence against the blackness of the starless night. To fight my way to the shore through that wide area of roaring, leaping, and seething breakers promised to be a task that would tax my strength and energy to their utmost limits; but it was a case of necessity, and I had undertaken to do it; therefore, throwing off the borrowed boat cloak, with a word of farewell to the skipper of the boat, I waited for the next oncoming breaker, and dived overboard at the precise moment when it would catch me up in its mighty arms and sweep me, without effort on my part, a good twenty fathoms toward the shore. _B-r-r-r_! The water struck icy cold to my warm skin as I plunged deep into the heart of the great arching mass of water, which caught me just as I was rising to the surface and hurled me shoreward with irresistible force, rolling me over and over like a cork as it broke into a long line of hissing, pallid foam. But I knew exactly what to expect, and was fully prepared for it. I therefore allowed it to do with me just what it would, holding my breath and waiting until the breaker had passed ahead and spent its force. Then, striking out strongly as I came to the surface, I swam on toward the next line of breakers, where the same thing was repeated, but each time a shade less violently, until at length, after what seemed like hours, but which, as a matter of fact, could not have been more than about forty minutes of battling with the breakers, my feet touched ground, and a moment later the last breaker, a very mild and harmless one compared with those in the offing, lifted me up and almost gently deposited me on the beach.