There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water gentry.  We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for years, but never have learned his name.  About this person we shall have accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;—­thus, his face, figure, gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be familiar to us; yet who he is we know not.  In another department of our consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found the person to match.  We have heard it so often, that it has idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick.  Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely.  But now and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a fellow-citizen.  Now the slack-water gentry are among the persons most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and reality,—­for the reason, that, playing no important part in the community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq.  He had been “dead-headed” into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his pockets staring at the show ever since.  I shall not tell you, for reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived.  I will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go “down East,” each of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental character they have in common.  I need not tell you that these towns are Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland.  The Oriental character they have in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them.  The two first have seen better days.  They are in perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility.  Each of them is a “paradise of demi-fortunes.”  Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and private speculation, as frequently