senseless, and indeed helpless, as to my own deliverance; for the blow
taking my side and breast, beat the breath, as it were, quite out of my
body; and had it returned again immediately, I must have been strangled
in the water; but I recovered a little before the return of the waves,
and seeing I should be covered again with the water, I resolved to hold
fast by a piece of the rock, and so to hold my breath, if possible, till
the wave went back; now as the waves were not so high as at first, being
near land, I held my hold till the wave abated, and then fetched another
run, which brought me so near the shore that the next wave, though it
went over me, yet did not so swallow me up as to carry me away, and the
next run I took, I got to the main land, where, to my great comfort, I
clambered up the clifts of the shore, and sat me down upon the grass,
free from danger, and quite out of the reach of the water.

DEFOE'S _Robinson Crusoe_.



[Notes: _Daniel Defoe_, born 1663, died 1731. He was prominent as a
political writer, but his later fame has rested chiefly on his works of
fiction, of which 'Robinson Crusoe' (from which this extract is taken)
is the most important.


"_Gave us not time hardly to say_." This to us has the effect of a
double negative. But if we take "hardly" in its strict sense, the
sentence is clear: "did not give us time, even with difficulty, to say."


(_at foot_)."_As_ I felt myself rising up, _so_ to my