He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up
many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to
speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated
railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap to hang to on a
Sixth Avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the
hot battle he lived in. From his childhood he had known nothing but
the fever heat of his "little old New York," as he called it with
affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was
accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was
impressed by his feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth.
He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.

"Something doing," he said. "That's what my sort of a fellow
likes--something doing. You feel it right there when you walk along
the streets. Little old New York for mine. It's good enough for Little
Willie. And it never stops. Why, Broadway at night----"

He forgot his chop, and leaned forward on the table to pour forth his
description. The manservant, standing behind Mount Dunstan's chair,
forgot himself also, thought he was a trained domestic whose duty it
was to present dishes to the attention without any apparent mental
processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen, and gaze
fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of
his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly
sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if
they were a necessary part of any conversation--the blunt, uneducated
bareness of figure--seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the
picture dashed off. The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night
as by day. Crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and
clanging bells, the elevated railroad rushing and roaring past within
hearing, theatre fronts flaming with electric light, announcements of
names of theatrical stars and the plays they appeared in, electric
light advertisements of brands of cigars, whiskies, breakfast foods, all
blazing high in the night air in such number and with such strength of
brilliancy that the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as a
ballroom or a theatre. The vicar felt himself standing in the midst of
it all, blinded by the glare.

"Sit down on the sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a
magazine--any old thing