He found indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such surroundings.
"What Little Willie was expecting," he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr.Penzance, "was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere.

I ought to have said 'pub,' oughtn't I?
You don't call them saloons here." 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.