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 you like,” with an exultant laugh.

The names of the dramatic stars blazing over entrances to the theatres were often English names, their plays English plays, their companies made up of English men and women.  G. Selden was as familiar with them and commented upon their gifts as easily as if he had drawn his drama from the Strand instead of from Broadway.  The novels piled up in the stations of what he called “the L” (which revealed itself as being a New-York-haste abbreviation of Elevated railroad), were in large proportion English novels, and he had his ingenuous estimate of English novelists, as well as of all else.

“Ruddy, now,” he said; “I like him.  He’s all right, even though we haven’t quite caught onto India yet.”

The dazzle and brilliancy of Broadway so surrounded Penzance that he found it necessary to withdraw himself and return to his immediate surroundings, that he might recover from his sense of interested bewilderment.  His eyes fell upon the stern lineaments of a Mount Dunstan in a costume of the time of Henry VIII.  He was a burly gentleman, whose ruff-shortened thick neck and haughty fixedness of stare from the background of his portrait were such as seemed to eliminate him from the scheme of things, the clanging of electric cars, and the prevailing roar of the L. Confronted by his gaze, electric light advertisements of whiskies, cigars, and corsets seemed impossible.

“He’s all right,” continued G. Selden.  “I’m ready to separate myself from one fifty any time I see a new book of his.  He’s got the goods with him.”