The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles from London: the knight came and took possession of it.

He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred bridges of stone, bricks, and timber.

One fine morning the river entered London, which was short of water.

Ursus transformed all these vulgar details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay them"-- an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.
Ursus was great in soliloquy.

Of a disposition at once unsociable and talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself.