"Here, catch hold, if you're feeling peckish." He thrust a loaf into my hands and I fell on it ravenously, plucking off a crust and gnawing it while I trotted beside him.
"Got to feed her blessed swans now!" he muttered.

"The deuce is in her for perversity to-night." He kept growling to himself, knitting his brow and pausing once or twice for a moody stare.

He was not drunk, and his high complexion showed no trace of his all-night sitting; and yet something had changed him utterly from the cheerful gentleman of a few hours back.
The water in the valley bottom proved to be an artificial lake, very cunningly contrived to resemble a wild one.

At the head of it, where we trod on asphodels and sweet-smelling mints and brushed the young stalks of the loose-strife, stood a rustic bridge partly screened by alders.

Here Mr.Rogers halted, and a couple of fine swans came steering towards him out of the shadows.
He broke his loaf into two pieces.